Learning From Sea Glass
A Poem, a Pondering, and a Practice
The Summer Day
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?
From New and Selected Poems, Vol. 1 (Beacon Press, 1992).
Bearing our treasures after a slow, meandering walk on the beach searching for sea glass.
A Pondering: Learning From Sea Glass
“The Summer Day” is perhaps Mary Oliver’s most famous and well-known poem. And for good reason. I can still remember where I was standing the first time I heard it about a decade ago. I can hear the voice of the friend who read it to me. Her imagery is so simple and clear, yet so memorable and evocative. I can see the grasshopper in her hand—I want it to be my hand!
Her reflections on prayer in this poem—acknowledging the mystery of prayer and clarifying that prayer is less about speaking words than about inhabiting a posture of attention to God’s unexpected and inexpressible presence in our lives—has been a wellspring of wisdom and guidance to me in my spiritual life over the past many years. And who hasn’t heard her final, searing, soaring, exquisite, urgent question and wanted nothing more than to revive your deepest, truest, most secret dreams you’ve had since childhood? “Tell me, what is it you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life?” What a remarkable question. It is a question that can transform a life.
But lately I’ve been thinking about how she unapologetically describes her day as having been spent “strolling through the fields” and being “idle and blessed.” Her lack of embarrassment or shame in spending her day doing such wildly unproductive things as kneeling in the grass, meandering through fields, and feeding grasshoppers sugar has been a source of both amazement and aspiration for me.
I am so gripped by the need to be productive, to conform to what sociologist Felicia Wu Song called the “unspoken virtue of our culture.” I have been so convinced that my value and my worth are dependent on what I do and what I produce, that to spend a day being unproductive generates anxiety and activates my inner critic, who pours on the shame: “Stop wasting your time! There is so much to do! You’re so lazy!”
Oliver was nobody’s fool. She presents idleness as an act of protest against the overreach of productivity culture and calls it a “blessing.” The point, for her, is to be wholly present, undivided in one’s attention to what is before you and within you. She was blessed in her idleness because she was fully there, fully alive. And, ironically, because she was totally present in her idleness, when she reflected on it later it produced her most successful poem. Perhaps idleness and productivity are not oil and water after all, but necessary and reciprocal—feeding, focusing, and fueling each other.
And finally we arrive at sea glass. I’ve been thinking about all of this over the past few weeks as Mariah and I began a practice of walking slowly on the beach each day to search for sea glass. I resisted this initially. I tend to enjoy walking quickly, moving with purpose from point A to point B, increasing my step count even as I increase my heart rate. Perhaps it’s an echo of my formation in the ways of productivity and efficiency. Mariah, on the other hand, likes to walk slowly and stop to pick up pretty rocks and sea shells. She likes to meander. She’s got more Mary Oliver in her than I do.
For a while I would get irritated as she stopped to pick up a bit of sea glass from the beach, even as I marveled at how on earth she saw it amongst all the rocks. Eventually I had to make a choice. Either I could remain frustrated on our walks, I could ask her to walk more quickly with me, or I could join her in her delight and search for sea glass with her. I chose the latter. It has made all the difference. Now I walk slowly and search for sea glass even when we aren’t walking together. The rush of delight when your eye catches a glint of blue or green in the sand. The way my eyes are learning to differentiate glass from colored rocks and mussel shells. The shared delight of showing each other the piece we just found. It serves no other purpose than infusing our walks with joy, of lifting our spirits, of opening our eyes to the presence of beauty and light and the myriad gifts lying in wait at our feet.
I’m trying to learn from Mary Oliver and from the sea glass how to inhabit presence in my life, how to be a “seeker of sweetness,” as she says in another poem, how to slow myself down enough to see the beauty all around me, to feel blessed in idleness, even when my heart is heavy with the burdens of the world.
A Practice: Walk Slowly and Bow Often
In another poem, “When I Am Among the Trees,” Mary Oliver wrestles with her own difficulty resisting the urge to hurry and rush through her life. She laments,
I am so distant from the hope of myself,
in which I have goodness, and discernment,
and never hurry through the world
but walk slowly, and bow often.
The bowing Oliver is referring to here isn’t lying prostrate in worship, but rather an internal bow that is the offering of our full attention, the deep acknowledgment of another presence—whether human, animal, or otherwise—whose life is as beautiful and important as our own. I have literally been walking slowly and bowing often as Mariah and I stop and stoop to collect sea glass along the beach in Oak Harbor. It is changing the way I walk in other places as well.
This week’s practice is to intentionally slow down when you walk. And not just to slow down, but to pay attention. Feel your feet rhythmically touching the ground and rising. Feel your legs move, your arms swing, the wind touching your face. Pay attention to what’s around you. Don’t just look, but really see what you pass as you go. See the ground. See the trees. See the buildings and the people as you pass by. See them and love them. Bow to them in your heart. Acknowledge their presence and sacredness. Send kindness and goodwill in their direction. Smile as you pass them (even if it’s not a person).
Feel in your body and your spirit what this slower, intentional attending to your surroundings cultivates in you. Is it joy? Hope? Connection? Compassion? Gratitude? Whatever it is, notice it and nurture it for the rest of the day. Consider trying it again the next day. And the next.
