AND THE LIVIN' IS EASY.....

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 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?

“The sea does not reward those who are too anxious, too greedy or too impatient. One should lie empty, open, choiceless as a beach — waiting for a gift from the sea.”

Anne Morrow Lindbergh

“I have only to break into the tightness of a strawberry, and I see summer — its dust and lowering skies.”

Toni Morrison

HENRY HEADING OFF AT 5 AM TO TENNIS CAMP.

“A lot of parents pack up their troubles and send them off to summer camp.”

Raymond Duncan

“It’s a smile, it’s a kiss, it’s a sip of wine — it’s summertime!”

Kenny Chesney

“A vegetable garden in the beginning looks so promising and then, after all, little by little, it grows nothing but vegetables, nothing, nothing but vegetables!”

Gertrude Stein

“Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass under trees on a summer’s day, listening to the murmur of the water, or watching the clouds float across the sky, is by no means a waste of time.”

John Lubbock

“Every dew-drop paints a bow.”

Alfred Lord Tennyson 

“The cure for anything is salt water: sweat, tears or the sea.”

Isak Dinesen

The “cure” for me has always been a summer afternoon — as Henry James wrote, “the two most beautiful words in the English language.”