Our wild & precious lives
Hooray hooray hooray hooray hooray today’s my birthday! Hooray hooray hooray hooray hooray today’s my birthday! Not the pickle, not the pear, not the elephant, not the bear, not last week or yesterday – Hooray today’s my birthday!!!
This is the song I’ve been singing to friends and family on their birthdays for about the past 8 years. I learned it from my friend Guen Gifford, who loved to sing and be playful. Well, today IS my birthday and this special song is yet another way Guen continues to be in my life.
I returned home to Mount Shasta, CA last week after spending 10 days in Burlington, VT helping organize Guen’s memorial service. The gathering in her honor was a time to share our memories or Guen and what we, as a community of people touched by her life, continue to bring into our lives because of her.
This following poem by Mary Oliver has been on my mind a lot lately since we printed it in the program next to Guen’s photo. She had it posted on her wall (her actual bathroom wall, not on Facebook) accompanied by the above grasshopper sketch for the past many years, perhaps even over a decade. Oddly enough, this poem also feels fitting for my birthday. It calls us to LIVE and to live fully. Calls us to pay attention. To be curious and to revere each moment as sacred.
So, in honor of Guen, of birth (hers and mine), and of all of our wild and precious lives, I offer The Summer Day by 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?
Jen,
I don’t know if you saw it yet, as I would imagine your messages are pretty backlogged, but I did send you a Happy Birthday message on Facebook the other day. I hope you had a wonderful birthday.
This post is a lovely way to honor Guen’s impact on your life and to set an example on how to live with passion.
I hope you had a Happy Thanksgiving too. You are in my thoughts!
Jeanne