Freshly Mowed

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?"
Mary Oliver, excerpted from, The Summer Day

There is nothing I find more of an elixir for life than the tangy green smell of freshly mowed grass. It always conjures up sweet memories of summers growing up in the south; lazy days when time stretched out slow and golden. Grass cutting meant school would soon be out, we could start going barefoot and Dad would start making ice cream and frying fish. Now so many years down the road, remembering all those summers, I realize the deep restorative gift received by having those summer months to play outside, making up all sorts of games and adventures. Our modest little ranch house had a back yard that dropped off and ran a long distance towards a creek and it became a woodland wonderland. Summers were spent damming the creek, catching craw fish and building every imaginable kind of fort or playhouse. It was rich in the gifts of the world outside, not all of them pleasant: bee stings, broken arms, skinned knees, stubbed toes, poison ivy and mosquitoes bites, endless mosquito bites.

It is such a beautiful world we live in and we need it so much-- not just for sustenance of the body but also for the spirit. Recognizing and valuing beauty deepens our hearts towards ourselves and each other and draws our spirits towards their highest expressions. The enormous outpouring of feelings of anger, despair and grief over the Deepwater Horizon oil catastrophe is not only about the loss of jobs and income. Look at the sorrowful, frightened faces of the Gulf fishermen being interviewed. They know what many in their distancing from the real world have forgotten. What is being destroyed is not only a source of food and income but a place of great beauty that is as necessary to the human spirit as food. Every day the oil pours out into the sea is a reminder that we, collectively, have created this problem and that it will only be truly remedied when we all commit to re imagining how we live our lives. That is the great gift at the heart of this terrible disaster. Let us receive it. Tell me, what else should we have done?