The One Thing (Lisa)

Have you ever sat with flower in hand, searching its delicate intricacies? Or studied the vein patterns of a maple, oak or dogwood leaf, the symmetry of some and the wayward wanderings of another, like rain beads trailing, colliding and parting anew? Have you pondered how each evolved, to be, just as they are?

Did you ever squat down low, to watch an ant trail marching with crumbs on their backs to some known destination or stared, slack jawed at a hovering hummingbird?

Have you sat in silence and listened to the bustling hum of life all around you, only to have it interrupted by the singular sound of one bumble buzzing by?

What does the summer smell like? If you stepped outside in your mind, taking in a long, slow inhale, what scent would your nose recall? Can you smell the earthy loam of autumn? The falling snow on a winter’s day? The hopeful fragrance of spring?

There are so many things to notice and think about in this life. I mention all of this, because mostly, I am too overwhelmed by my, too many blessings, to stop and spend time pondering any one thing.

I wish to pray in this way today, to choose any one of those things and spend a good long time attending to just it, this one thing. I want to recognize the godliness in it and thank my God for it.

This is me, taking my religion, my faith, my prayerful self into my world and living with it and in it and it feels like a holy thing. What is this, if not holy? What is this, if not a prayer, to notice and appreciate the godliness of any one thing.

This is the one thing I want to do with my wild and precious life, my life that will surely end, at last and all too soon. I want to bring this kind of mindfulness into my living because it informs everything else, my loving and tending and being.

Dear Lord,

Help me appreciate one thing very well today. Help me take the thorough pondering of this one blessed thing and transform it into a gift I send out into this world.

Amen

Mary Oliver is a Pulitzer Prize winning poet but first, she was a grateful observer of God in all things. Her poem, The Summer Night inspired me to explore just one thing, to fall on knees and thank God for it.

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?

Mary Oliver (1935-2019)

We are heading south on I 95 now, driving over an amazing overpass and bridge that human beings made and I wonder at the industry of man. A plane flies overhead, a hum of metal and fuel carrying hundreds of people across the blue sky, like a bird only higher. As I sit in the passenger seat, laptop balanced on my knees writing this, a tiny lady bug crawls up the window and falls into my open palm.

I think it’s time for me to stop listing marvels and take some time with this, just one thing… What wonder will you ponder in this moment?