The last two lines of Mary Oliver’s poem The Summer Day can be found pinned to students dorm walls, stuck to fridge doors, written on School Yearbooks and spoken by corporate keynote speakers. I have used them in sermons over the years. However, perhaps more attention needs to be paid to the earlier lines in the poem. Oliver, so often asks us to pay attention to the immediate moment. She urges us to notice where we are and what is all around us. The mood of the poem is not about the hurry we find ourselves in most of the day. She urges us to stop and notice and compares it to saying a prayer. Do you know how to fall down on the grass and be still? Do you know how to stop and notice? What else should we have done? I wonder!
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.
Prayer:
Holy God,
we approach you in prayer
first by being still with our eyes open.
Help us to pay attention to all that is around us,
whether we sit in a field of tall grass or rest
comfortably within our own home.
Lord God in this stillness here in my own
back yard, the sight of the hummingbird
feeding and fleeting fast and faster, the bright red
of the cardinal feeding at leisure from the hanging
tray of food, the loud song of the tiny wren, all this and more
inspires me to be thankful for
the beauty all around me.
You O Lord remind us Is not life more than food,
and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air:
they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns,
and yet your heavenly Father feeds them.
Are you not of more value than they?
Help me O Lord to pay attention. Amen.
Prayers, Poems, and Christian Ponderings 
What a delightful post and isn’t this the perfect summer poem! Having been born and raised in an academic environment, our year was considered September through May and then the real pleasures began. In the heat of July and August grasshoppers were abundant. We would often try and catch one to keep in a little bamboo cricket cage. Cupping our hands together and crouching low we would try to trap the creatures and they would often spit an ugly brown liquid in the process. We were rarely successful in this endeavor. As I think back to childhood pastimes, those most precious were not hurried; watching a box turtle chew a piece of lettuce, a spider building a web, ants hard at work, looking for figures in the clouds. The poem is a lesson for adults, and a wise one.
We are advised to keep busy, keep moving, keep learning while at the same time being told to relax, to take it easy, to stop and smell the roses. My sense is that those who can do all of these things in a reasonable balance can enjoy a wild and precious life, and one with time to be idle and blessed as well.
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