Remember being a child and lying in soft green grass…looking up at clouds as they lazily drifted by…making necklaces out of clover…playing softball with makeshift bases…waiting for the ice cream truck to come by on a hot afternoon…drinking water out of the garden hose….really taking in the joy of summer, or any other day…the sights, aromas, sounds, feelings.
Long before we all learned how to be more “efficient” with our time.
Maybe it’s good to occasionally go back to those days.
Become a swan. Or a grasshopper.
It’s good to be alive. It’s good to be older. And maybe sometimes best of all, it’s good to just be. To, as poet Mary Oliver says, “know how to be idle.”
Otherwise just think of what we are missing.
The Summer Day
by Mary Oliver
“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?”
As boomers and beyond, we understand more than ever how valuable life is, and how fragile. How friends leave us. How grandchildren and nieces and nephews grow up so fast. How pets age as well and remind us we’re not so young anymore. In some ways it seems like forever since we played hopskotch or hide-and-seek in the evenings. But in other ways, it feels like yesterday.
One of the best-selling books right now is a coloring book for adults. What bliss! If you don’t believe me, go buy a new set of crayons. Open the box. Close your eyes and sniff.
Tell me that doesn’t take you back to a part of you that’s been quiet a long, long time. So go ahead. Be a grasshopper. Lie in the grass. And by all means, color outside the lines.
****(And gentle friends, in the spirit of being creative as well as efficient with your time, you may be relieved to know that RockTheWrinkle.com will now be updated weekly (as opposed to 2x a week) unless the spirit moves me otherwise. Get out there and enjoy the season!)
“Time you enjoy wasting, was not wasted.”
John Lennon
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