Choosing Our Lives

Many of us imagine that we’d be happy if only things would go smoothly. If only things were more predictable and less challenging, then we’d be able to get to all those things we’ve been meaning to do. I remember learning many years ago when I was leading an organization and making a practice of schmoozing with ‘important’ people that when someone said ‘Let’s get together when things settle down,’ that meant they didn’t really want to take the time to meet with you.

What do you want to take the time to do? What will you say yes to? What will you say no to? In the midst of an ever-expanding number of choices, what’s worth doing? What’s most important. These are the urgent questions that arise for us humans again and again.

I first heard Mary Oliver’s poem The Summer Day read at a Pottery and Zen workshop I attended in the mid-80’s and her formulation of these questions has stayed with me ever since. In the poem, she wonders about the meaning of life then quickly falls into one of her now-familiar reveries about the specifics of the outdoor moment in which she finds herself.

I’m reminded here of the Zen practice of calling out and receiving. It’s a kind of Zen prayer in which you internally call out to the universe from the place of your true need. You can call the universe whatever you want: God, Buddhas and Bodhisattvas, my True Heart, Life or even Hey You. You call out asking for help from the deepest and most desperate place you know. THEN, you stop calling out and receive whatever arises in that particular moment as the response to your calling out. It may be just the sensation of your breath, it may be a sound or an image. It may be nothing at all. It may be, as it apparently was in Oliver’s case, a grasshopper.

Oliver observes the grasshopper ‘who has flung herself out of the grass…who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.’ She then extols the general virtue of paying attention to the particular and claims she is ‘idle and blessed.’ (Through this we have to assume that her carefully crafted and apparently natural poems are part of her idleness and her blessing – for she is not just ‘strolling through the fields’ as she claims. She is also coming home and writing about it as well, otherwise we would never know of her wondrous wonder.)

Then, in the poem, everything changes. She brings in death as an unexpected ally in her defense against the tyranny of busyness and productivity: Tell me, what else should I have done? / Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?. Funny—to invite death in to bolster your case for ease and reverie.

So often we think of death as our adversary—our mortal enemy. We use all the tricks available to us to avoid meeting directly with this most universal and unavoidable reality. We deny, we bargain, we rage, we withdraw. Yet as long as we push away the reality of death, we have no place to rest because we are constantly running from one of the most dependable aspects of our life.

I’ll never forget a conversation many years ago with my Zen teacher under a huge live oak near the retreat center where we were teaching just outside of Tallahassee. The old live oaks in that area are stunning. Enormous, spreading, and draped with Spanish moss, their leaves are green all year and they can live for over 500 years. The one we stopped under was an ancient and stunning specimen that some of the neighbors had honored by putting a park bench under its capacious spreading limbs.

It was there he spoke of his gratitude for death. Not that he wanted to die, but he imagined how unbearable an unending life would be. All your friends would die and you would be left alone in the vast infinity of space. Perhaps we can speak of the vast infinity of space being right here in each moment, but the certainty of change and the certainty of death are also part of this moment without borders.

Oliver closes her public reverie with the two lines that I have carried with me these last forty years: ‘Tell me, what is it you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life?’ In these concluding lines, Oliver shifts her keen focus from her dreamlike meeting with her summer day and the grasshopper to you and me, the readers. Suddenly, we are in her crosshairs. ‘Tell me, what is it you plan to do’… In her challenge she affirms the possibility and the urgency of having a plan for the direction in which we intend to move.

So—in the face of the wonder and the inescapable brevity of life, how will you move forward into this day in which you find yourself? How will you meet the clamor and disturbance that will certainly come your way? What intention may guide you? What will you give your life to today?