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Today's
Quotation:
When
it's over, I don't want to wonder
If I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.
I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.
Mary Oliver
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Today's
Meditation:
Are we
just visitors here, on this planet only to look around and
see the sights and then leave, moving on to somewhere
else? Or are we here to contribute to this planet, to
our communities, to the world as a whole? Do we just
look at everything around us and assign names and labels to
everything, or do we allow all that we see to give us a
sense of wonder, a sense of awe?
A couple of lines earlier in this poem ("When Death
Comes"), Mary says, "I want to say all my life / I
was a bride married to amazement." Mary wants to
be an integral part of this life that we're living, and she
wants her time here to mean something, to stand for
something. She wants to be curious and learn all that
she can while she's here, to get the most that she possibly
can out of all that touches her life. She wants to
appreciate, to cherish, to feel her connection to everything
else that's here.
When I die, I hope the same thing-- that I will have lived
my life fully, that I will have contributed to the greater
good somehow, that I will have taken all that is offered to
me and made the most of it all. I don't want to reach
the end of life and regret all that I haven't done, or feel
that I didn't appreciate all the wonderful things in my life
when I had the chance to really appreciate them.
So what can I do now to make sure that I don't reach the end
with a ton of regret for wonder that I haven't felt, for awe
that hasn't inspired me, for amazement that I've squelched
and not allowed to be expressed or felt? Quite simply,
I can open my eyes more widely and try to see more than I
normally see-- I can pay attention to things that I usually
ignore. I can look at them more closely and find
things to appreciate about them. I can learn from the
children around me who feel that sense of wonder constantly
until we teach them not to do so.
You're visiting this world, but you don't have to be merely
a visitor. You can be a contributor, an integral part,
a wonderer. It really is up to you whether you want to
make the effort to be so or not.
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