Wild and Precious Life

“Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” Mary Oliver, New and Selected Poems

I love that quote, it makes me want to get up and dance. As we all know, life is not as easy as we would like it to be. There are obstacles and issues. Fights with spouses and kids, a bad day at work, financial woes, the list goes on.

Yet truly, we each have one life and most of the time we don’t treat it as precious or wild. We may not even be grateful for it, as we are mired in the problems of the present. Then we talk to someone who has suffered a catastrophic loss or  illness and one of the sentences that comes out of their mouths is often: “I have so much to be grateful for”. And you look at them and wonder how they can say that.

They can say that because they know what it means to come close to losing it all. They know that their life is precious. As is ours, and too often we lose sight of that. It can be a real challenge to lift your eyes up and see that the forest is really just a bunch of trees gathered together, not an impenetrable mass that blocks you from moving forward.

As I write this, it is Sunday, which in many religions is considered to be a day of rest and reflection. Even if you are not religious, take some time to be grateful for what you have, it will set you on a positive path for the week.

And taking my own advice, this afternoon I am going to a small park nearby with my journal to write and celebrate my wild and precious life. It’s my form of dancing, in this case, dancing my pen across the page.