12/12/2025
Mary Oliver always finds a way to bring us back into connection with what’s alive: the world around us, and the world within us.
This line lives in so many of us:
“Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?”
In embodied relational Gestalt therapy, I often think of this question not as a demand for an answer…
but as an invitation into sensing.
Into presence.
Into the felt experience of being alive in this moment.
Maybe the question isn’t “What should I do?”
Maybe it’s:
🌿 What world do I want to create and inhabit? and what is keeping me from living my life?
🌿 What awakens me?
🌿 What brings me into connection with myself, with others, with the world?
Sometimes living your “wild and precious life” begins with noticing one breath, one patch of light, one small sensation that reminds you:
You’re here. You’re alive. You get to choose how you show up.
Below is the full poem that continues to root so many of us in wonder, attention, and the wild sacredness of being human.
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?
