Words for a New Year

“Tell me, what is it you plan to do

with your one wild and precious life?” — Mary Oliver

I read that Mary Oliver, Pulitzer Prize winning poet, recently passed away. I’m not that familiar with her work, so in poking around the internet to see what else she wrote that I may have read, I came across her poem “The Summer Day”.

I realize that this is probably the most pintrested and quoted line she ever wrote (which says a lot, because she wrote so many powerful/inspiring lines!) But at the awakening of this new year, at this point in my personal trajectory, this was the question I needed to ask myself.

You see, I woke up, having reached a certain age, to find that I’m not all that comfortable in my own life because it was designed for different circumstances, for things that never became part of my story. And there was no room for some things that did. I spent 50 years knitting a life that doesn’t fit me and I feel like I’ve been working way to hard at it!

Then I read a poem, and it asked me a question that I realized it was time to answer. This time based on what is real for me now, what is possible for my life, and what I really want to do. And it doesn’t mean throwing everything out … it means knitting a new ‘suit’, one that fits who I am (still working on that) and all that I hold dear. One with enough stretch to comfortably accommodate all the wonder and joy that I have yet to take in. I will love, I will learn, I will create beauty, I will dance, I will sing, I will write.

What do I plan to do with my one wild and precious life? I plan to love it. That will do for now.

#SweetEsther