I ask this now, each time something particularly beautiful in nature captures my eye. The question encompasses what I feel in that moment. Wonder, awe, joy, gratitude, love. A young tree beginning to blush at the tail end of summer. A caterpillar braving the trail to get under the leaf on the other side. A butterfly delighting in her abilities to dance and pirouette and cabriole amid blossoms. Because I don’t know what else to say to the marvel before me, I ask, who made you?
At the beginning of the biopic Mary Oliver: Saved by the Beauty of the World, Stephen Colbert attempts to recite her poem, The Summer Day. A few lines in, he’s overtaken. I, too, cannot read the poem without tears to honor its meaning.
I hadn’t heard the poem before (I know, sorry), and I knew very little of Mary Oliver, so I was especially captivated watching the film. True to the reputation that good writers are fascinating and can only live a life they’ve written for themselves, Oliver’s life was mesmerizing to a viewer living an ordinary existence. There are twenty-eight books listed on her website, and I’ve only read one due to my fatal writer’s flaw of not embracing poetry earnestly.
My takeaway of the film, other than that I need to read more Mary Oliver, is The Summer Day. Every line feels like a gift. Of wonder, awe, joy, gratitude, love. The ending, a gift of permission.
The Summer Day
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?
