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—
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

This poem has always spoken to me, but I am again open to such voices whispering and sometimes shouting at me to listen. Having spent time in nature again as of late, I am reminded of the imporantance of such things as paying attention to God's creations and in doing so, commit a kind of prayer.

How many gifts and blessings have been provided me, I cannot begin to enumerate for the count is indeed higher than I probably know. But I am grateful for those who have come into my life and for the love they give and hope I show that love in return. I am grateful for the moments shared and the moments alone during which the common and the unique can be viewed as precious.

For these things and all the others that may seem trivial to some, I thank the universe and the spirit found within it. Truly and repeatedly I will tell you, I am a blessed man.

I do not try to equate science to concepts of God. One is spirit, one is of the mind. They are separate and they are one. There is no conflict as I do not try to prove the presence of one with the ways of the other.

There is truth in both.