I’m back from my holiday travels, feeling nourished and inspired about this coming year and all the potential it holds. Inspired and also in awe of all that can happen for each of us in 365 days.
Truly, the new year always feels like a bit of a gift to me.
A blank slate. A chance to craft and script more of the life I’d like to consciously live and a chance to move away from that which no longer serves me.
It’s a time of year when I ask myself a question taken from the poem, The Summer Day, by Pulitzer-Prize winning poet, Mary Oliver.
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?
– Mary Oliver
These two lines, “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” contain the question I feel compelled to ask myself each year.
And indeed, I think this is the question (or one of the questions) we are all called to answer this new year if we want to more fully show up for our lives.
In 2017, life, for many of us, may have felt more turbulent, more fleeting, more challenging than any other in recent memory.
The fragility and preciousness of life can often feel more marked in such contrast. It did for me at least.
And such fragility reminds me to ask this question of myself and to all who come through my doors for counseling and for help, “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”
In asking this question, we can acknowledge that life is fleeting and that we will die. And that, while death is unavoidable, it can be a source of great inspiration and motivation to help us more clearly see how it is we want to live while we do.
