Here is a very well-known poem by the American poet Mary Oliver, called “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 final two lines are very often quoted. Taken out of context, they sound like a challenge, a sort of existential shock therapy. But read in context, they are more like a defensive manoeuvre. She is saying something like this: here is how I have been spending my day, and if you think I have been wasting my time, then what are you doing that you think is more important?
At the heart of the poem is a grasshopper - the focus of Mary Oliver's delighted attention. There is awe, gratitude, astonishment, a sense of having been blessed, and also something that is understood as being analogous to prayer: kneeling down in the grass, while at the same time admitting to not quite knowing what prayer is.
What is all of this about? It’s to do with paying attention to the world, and also to your own act of paying attention: noticing yourself noticing the world, and experiencing a sense of surprise at finding yourself as an awake, alive, breathing being on a the surface of a planet. The Jewish writer Abraham Heschel calls this “radical amazement”:
Radical amazement has a wider scope than any other act of man. While any act of perception or cognition has as its object a selected segment of reality, radical amazement refers to all of reality; not only to what we see, but also to the very act of seeing as well as to our own selves, to the selves that see and are amazed at their ability to see.
This mode of experience doesn’t prove anything, show you any new facts, or put you inside some special story in relation to which other people are outsiders. But it re-enchants the world: the shift is rather like what you might experience on hearing a familiar piece of music played by a really exceptional musician. The kind of attention that Mary Oliver is describing is a form of love. This love encompasses, but goes beyond, the particular aspects of the natural world that she is describing; ultimately, it is directed towards the unknown source and ground by virtue of which she is able to experience what she experiences and perceive what she perceives. Put more simply, Mary Oliver is not explaining, but exemplifying, what it might mean to love God.
(This is an extract from a longer piece that I posted in 2019. I thought it might work better as a freestanding post. Ben Wood's discussion of the same poem is well worth reading.)
