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Tell me, what is it you plan to do
With your one wild and precious life?
The concluding question of Mary Oliver’s short poem, “The Summer Day,” prompts another response. Viewing my life as one wild and precious deepens with the lessening of the denial of my terminal illness: one, in the sense of being unique; wild, in the sense of dreams for fresh learning; and precious, in the sense of God’s unconditional love for me.
Many significant teachers, past and present, have helped me to this self-knowledge, in union with their own participation in the Sacred. This new learning engages this summer day and sets it aglow, unlike any other day that I’ll ever have. Even the poem’s title, “The Summer Day” emphasizes the primacy of the present moment. Note Oliver’s use of the adjective, “The,” in place of “a”—It’s not just any old day. Each day bears its own fruit, with its deepening commitment. Despite still much to learn, I no longer dwell upon the length of days allotted me.
So, the challenge to the able-bodied and the chronically ill prickles under the skin: No day is to be wasted for the build-up of the Kingdom of God. Our world depends upon it.
Even in the face of daily shootings and consequent mayhem, Mary Oliver offers spirit-support through her poems, “The Summer Day,” being among them.
Our listening creates a sanctuary for the homeless parts within the other person.
I discovered this gift in another book while rooting around for a topic for my next blog—gift because of its striking use of juxtaposition: creates, sanctuary, and homeless parts with listening; gift, because of its power in shoving apart steel barriers imprisoning my psychic depths. I still wince at the scraping sounds on the cement floor of my prison.
Its distinguished author is Rachel Naomi Remen, medical teacher, author, poet, and currently professor at Osher Center of Integrative Medicine at University of California San Francisco.
So moved was I by this quotation that I decided to use it in the first person, then amplify it according to my present circumstances.
My CPA Recovery teaches the primacy of listening, of stepping back from distractions and become fully engaged in the beauty of the unfolding moment, whether shared with a significant other or alone, whether spoken or in print. Exercising the Twelve Steps facilitates this process.
Like pesky mosquitoes hovering over creek beds, my symptoms zap my inner quiet and prohibit listening—then, imprison me until time for bed and sleep with my “cocktail.” Such intrusions pull me out of prayer and into anxiety, impatience, and my need for help, more than I’d like to admit.
But when I’m able to sort through the rabble and bring compassion to the troublemakers, or the homeless parts, a new creation occurs: its colors, scintillating and fresh, like that First Morning Genesis describes. I find myself in a sanctuary, a place of communion, peace, and joy, unlike any I’ve seen around the world.
Only Precious God produces such revelations that buoy me until the next one, usually on the heels of a spell of aridity. I’m humbled and grateful.
Blackbird singing in the dead of night, so addressed the poet/musician Paul McCartney to this harbinger of spring, with its rich flute-like trills. Then, he unleashed his response to police forcibly removing a black woman from the white section of a New York restaurant in 1968. Moving back from his hotel window across the street, he continued writing.
A close look at the words chosen for this song-poem evidenced Paul’s artistry: This was not your usual blackbird; in the UK, the words bird and girl were used interchangeably, so the victim in the fracas morphed into blackbird whose spirit sang, no matter the violence fraught with death. Years of such bludgeoning no longer mattered and spawned more protest marches.
Only visionaries intuit patterns for critical change, and McCartney’s revolutionary paradoxes sought to fulfill this purpose:
Take these broken wings and learn to fly.
Take these sunken eyes and learn to see.
The mandate to receive these gifts, despite their uselessness, and learn different ways of empowerment and vision was clear. Precisely in their woundedness, they would find healing, through their imaginations. It would be their experience.
Indeed,
All your life/you were only waiting for this moment to come.
That moment has come and gone. Not much has changed, or so it seems. Ensuing betrayals and tribulations have scarred hearts, that is true, but more learning to fly and see continue among us.
And the mandate still holds:
Blackbird fly/ Into the light of the dark black of night.
Within that paradox, LIFE abounds … and always has.
Heart Whisperings 