Operation Oxygen Mask (OOM) Week 24: Revive

For our final week of “the 3 Rs” we are thinking about how we can revive ourselves for the year ahead. We spent 3 weeks reflecting on 2020, we thought about how we can reset ourselves and start the year with a clean slate, and hopefully now we can move onwards with a bit of newfound energy and positivity. There are still difficult days ahead of us, but we know that we can get through them with the help of one another, and by drawing on a foundation of having taken good care of ourselves.

In order to think about this, I would like to share one of my favorite poems by Mary Oliver. It concludes with a question: “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”

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 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?