She filled with mirth at morning’s sign: yellow light and cast of warmth, how fast the world was changed.
Anything was possible. Anything could be.
She sat with the light at island rest, morning coffee that further stirred, further woke, warming and gifting further energy to the hope.
In the morning light, she sat and read. Quiet in room, spring songs spoke from world beyond: birds on wing, chimes in wind, even the sounds of early mowers droned in idyllic tone in the romance of the light.
On open page, she read from the book:
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 on 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 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?[i]
What did she plan to do with her one wild and precious life?
To be hopeful and amazed—to be surprised and awed with Wonder.
That was her plan.
Day began true and so: hopeful and awed in the simple wonder of presence in wakened, living summer world.
[i] Mary Oliver, “The Summer Day.”