Dear Friends,

I was recently given the opportunity to write and share a brief reflection with the community at the Unitarian Church of Montpelier in response to Mary Oliver’s well-known poem, “The Summer Day”. Here goes:

I remember when I was a kid, how slowly time seemed to pass while waiting for something to happen – a friend to arrive, the school bell to ring, or, perhaps, a church service to finally end. The waiting was insufferable; I could feel the hands of the clock creaking as they made way around the seconds, minutes, and hours. But I’m middle-aged now, and time seems to pass so much more quickly (a kind of inflation – the currency of time doesn’t buy what it used to). My perception is of time flying by or slipping away, as my life’s reservoir of time drains with increasing velocity. This dawning sense of time frames how I think about the poet’s question: What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

The author Oliver Burkeman writes in his latest book 4,000 Weeks (which is the approximate life expectancy for someone like me): “At the end of your life, looking back, whatever compelled your attention from moment to moment is simply what your life will have been.” Uh-oh. There’s a problem in that my attention is often fractured, usurped, and disrupted by so many competing attractions – some enriching, some not so much. A waterfall of obligations, responsibilities, and commitments require my attention, too.

Mary Oliver’s poem asks the question we are reflecting on today. And, it also points me toward a response when she tells us, almost defensively: I do know how to pay attention. Her poetry has taught me about looking and listening and feeling and experiencing and loving the world, especially the natural landscape. In “The Summer Day” – in perhaps all her poems – she beckons us to pay attention to this wild life we inhabit.

A durable, if aspirational, answer to her question, one that might sustain me for the rest of my days, is this: be present and pay attention. But also, more importantly, pay attention to what I’m paying attention to. I want to pay attention to the things that enrich me, that strengthen my connection with my fellow humans, other earthly cohabitants, and the vast cosmic ecology holding us all together. I want to pay attention to the fact of our interconnectivity.

If at the subatomic level, the boundaries between you and me, between me and everything in this great universe, are less solid than we perceive – because subatomic particles are in fact dancing in between us – then let me pay attention to all that surrounds me in order to live into this grand interconnectivity. I think this is also a practice of building empathy with others and our world. This is what I plan to do.

With attention,

Jeremy