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Many of you are doubtlessly familiar with Mary Oliver’s “The Summer’s Day”–with its moving invitation to attentiveness and to relishing one’s “one wild and precious life.” But in these long days of “ordinary time,” we might just need a reminder that even when things seem even less than ideal, even when we’ve seen something “a thousand times”–whether our environment, our people, our work–there is still more to see, more to love, more to celebrate.
Summer Morning
Mary Oliver
Heart,
I implore you,
it’s time to come back
from the dark,
it’s morning,
the hill are pink
and the roses
whatever they felt
in the valley of night
are opening now
their soft dresses,
their leaves
are shining.
Why are you laggard?
Sure you have seen this
a thousand times,
which isn’t half enough.
Let the world
have its way with you,
luminous as it is
with mystery
and pain–
graced as it is
with the ordinary.
I like the word “ordinary”. Whenever I would use it as a reply to a doctor’s question “How are things going?”. He didn’t like it.
But I view ordinary as a good word. Nothing is achy or unusual and nothing is miraculously good.
For me, ordinary is sitting outside early in the morning, viewing the plants and flowers on the deck. Waiting for God to tell me what we will do today.