Wild Life

I am packing for a camping trip –adventure –tonight and was fortunate enough to come across a poem by Mary Oliver that, especially on the eve of my foray into nature, is worthy of pause. Talk about religion and poetry; Oliver’s work speaks for itself. My prayer is that when the sun goes down and my mind starts racing, imagining what kind of seething creatures lurk behind each rustling bush, I will remember the wonder of this poem.

Who made the world? Who made the swan, and the black bear? Who made the grasshopper? This grasshopper, I mean— the one who has flung herself out of the grass, the one who is eating sugar out of my hand, who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down— who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes. Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face. Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away. I don't know exactly what a prayer is. I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass, how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields, which is what I have been doing all day. Tell me, what else should I have done? Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon? Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

The wild child herself, Pocahontas, in the Disney movie bearing her name, asks "Should I choose the smoothest course/ Steady as the beating drum?" (stereotypical pun intended by Disney), when considering her marriage prospects. Or does something wait for her, she asks, "just around the river bend?"

What was it she planned to do with her one wild life? Or we with ours? For me, for now, I will go camping in Washington State's verdant forests. Not because I love camping, but because I hate it. It scares me, and pushes me, and I know I need to go.

I don't know exactly what a prayer is, but say one for me.

By Elizabeth Tenety  |  August 23, 2007; 9:46 AM ET  | Category:  Campus Catholic
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