Live: The Summer Day

Summer, I hardly knew ya. I can’t believe we’re already into August and I’ve barely baked summer in. Things can come and go so quickly. Before you know it, the things that seemed like they’d last forever are gone.

I recently picked up a book called “Teaching With Fire.” I’m not a teacher, I just liked the title. It was filled with all of these passionate poems and passages that just seemed to make sense to me.

I wanted to pass this one along to you and ask you, “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”

The Summer Day, By Mary Oliver

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the 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?

(emphasis: mine)

Love: Surrender

“Let yourself be silently drawn by the strange pull of what you really love.   It will not lead you astray.” ~ Rumi

Surrender is really hard for me. To me, it conjures up images of the loser in a battle. And I don’t like to lose.

Why then do I get all breathy when I think of surrendering to love? Have I watched too much Gone With The Wind?

I believe we battle this paradox in ourselves constantly. We want to give in to the wondrous pleasures of life – be it a lover, a delicious piece of chocolate, a moment to ourselves – but we fight it. We have in our heads sometimes that to surrender to a situation, person or thing we are drawn to that it signifies we are weak in some way…that we lose.

Why?

Oh, there are probably a million reasons why. I think if you think hard enough you find why the beliefs you hold are what they are. But try to welcome a new way of thinking, a new way of looking at surrender…in a good way!

The poet Mary Oliver completely reframed surrender for me in “Wild Geese”. She writes:

“You do not have to be good.You do not have to walk on your kneesfor a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.You only have to let the soft animal of your body            love what it loves….” 

Surrendering is not suffering. Surrendering does not mean you’ve lost your will. Surrendering is all about loving with complete abandon. And we’re not used to that. It exposes us too much.

Yes, surrendering is hard. Very hard. But you can learn how to surrender if you understand how it works. Author Bill Plotkin, in Nature and the Human Soul, said it best. “What’s involved is actually both a surrender of and a surrender to: first a surrender of your beliefs about how you were supposed to be and how the world was supposed to work, and then a surrender to your deepest and wildest passions.”

Did you get that?

You can’t truly feel the depths of passion until you’ve let go of everything you thought it would be. Then, what comes next is the best part: when you let go of all of yourself, you realize that the real stuff was better than you ever dreamed it could be all along. When you learn to love with quiet surrendering fire in your soul there can be no losing in that. It’s powerful.

If I could whisper in your ear right now, I would say to you something I hope you will learn to do, something worth devoting time and effort in mastering: I’d simply whisper, “Surrender.”

Copyright © by Kelley Taylor

Live…No, I really meant it. LIVE.

Often, I’m made keenly aware of how fleeting life is. Like, today I read that Oprah is dedicating a show to her dog, Sophie, that loved her unconditionally for 13 years.

Some may call her a crazy dog lady. OK. So be it. I’m a crazy dog lady. But when something or someone you love fades from your life, you realize just how precious this thing called life really is. And you want to honor it.

Today, I pulled out a book by Roger Housden called Ten Poems to Last a Lifetime. I re-read one of my favorite poems that echoes how I feel desperately about life. Oddly enough, it’s titled “When Death Comes.” (Get over the title, or that I’m about to quote poetry, believe me, it’s really good.)

Mary Oliver, who I have to say is probably my favorite poet, writes passionately that at the end of her life she wants “to step through the door full of curiosity…”

She continues:

When it’s over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.

I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.

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So now you know why I believe so deeply in making every moment count. Our lives are to be used, shared, and loved beyond holidays, special occasions, or any one moment we experience. The one life we have is to be expanded upon, discovered, perused, exposed, and explored.

I hope you’ll continue with me on this little journey. Let’s not just visit this world, let’s embrace it and take it into our arms.

Let’s really make today and every day…a holiday.

From my heart to yours,

 

Kelley Taylor