What else should I have done?

On Mary Oliver and achieving

Hello, friends! I’m sorry it’s been a little while since I’ve written. Life has been kind of lifey lately, if you know what I mean. Good, but a lot. But I missed you all!

A tweet of mine from a few years ago, about the Mary Oliver poem, The Summer Day, has been making the rounds again on the socials, so I thought I’d share the original essay I wrote about it. Here’s Mary’s poem:

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?

The Summer Day is one of Mary Oliver’s most beloved poems. It is about nature, about wandering, about prayer, and about thinking deeply about all of those things. But most of all, I think, it is about noticing. In the poem Mary Oliver is fully present in her wanderings, paying attention to everything that is happening around her, even — and perhaps mostly — the very small things. She has spent the whole day wandering and noticing, and she asks, rhetorically, "What else should I have done?"

In the last two lines of the poem, which are often quoted on their own, Oliver turns the question out to the reader. "Tell me, what is it you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life?" I find this question everywhere these days, and now even more as the world mourns Oliver's death. It is a powerful, piercing question, that awakens us to our own angelic value, naming our lives Wild and Precious, yet acknowledges in the same breath that we are mortal and do not have infinite time on this earth.

But taken out of the context of the whole poem, it can start to bear the weight of pressure. What are you doing? it seems to ask. Why are you wasting your time? What are you accomplishing? It used to make me anxious whenever I came across it. So then I would return to the poem, and read the rest of her words. Idle. Stroll. Blessed. She uses the word grass three times; she spends seven lines on a grasshopper. She confirms that this is not just a quick walk before buckling down to work — she has been doing this all day, this strolling, this paying attention.

A couple of days ago I remembered one of the biggest lessons of my life, which is that if I am struggling with something there are probably other people struggling with the same thing. So I tweeted a reminder that Mary Oliver answered that question for herself. I tweeted it, and I took a screen shot and posted it on Instagram.

And it went viral. I was right — other people were struggling, hearing Mary's beautiful words as a painful challenge. Even as I sit writing this my phone is lighting up with notification after notification. We need to be released from our culture's pressure to do and do and do. We need the exquisite uniqueness and beauty of our lives to be seen without being used as a whip or a spur.

As anyone who has been told, sadly, on report card day, "You have so much potential," knows, it does not feel like an compliment. But if Mary were here with you she would not ask you why your Bs were not As. She would probably ask you to go for a walk with her. And she might notice, on that walk, how the sun turns the wisps of hair around your temple a caramel brown. She might notice that you don't laugh easily but that when you do it is like church bells. She might notice that you showered this morning even though it took every ounce of energy in you, and that going on this walk is incredibly brave.

In an interview once, Maria Shriver asked Mary her question: "What do you think you have done with your one wild and precious life?" (Thank you to Marissa Marzano for the reference.) She answered, "What I have done is learn to love and learn to be loved. That didn't come easy. And I learned to consider my life an amazing gift. Those are the things."

I hope you all feel loved today, whether you are getting things done, or strolling idly, or lying in bed unable to do any of those things. And I hope you can notice at least one beautiful thing around you — a grasshopper, or a beam of sunlight through your window, or your own tired face in the mirror — beautiful and brave.

Love,
Jessica

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P.S. Glennon and Amanda referenced this piece on We Can Do Hard Things a couple of years ago. (They mention me around minute 35.)

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P.P.S. Have you picked up your copy of my latest poetry book, Open Things, yet?

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