The Grasshopper

I found Mary Oliver’s

Grasshopper** in South Africa

The creature caught my consciousness

In my peripheral             vision

As if to say to me all at once

Look! here now,

Yet please! keep your distance

As if my gaze was both

Desired and feared

By the two of us in this moment

The truth of intimacy—

The desire and the fear;

To be close yet not smothered

To be seen yet not ashamed

To be heard yet not misunderstood

To be noticed yet not judged

To merge yet not be consumed

Standing before this giant metamorphosis

I become naked, taken down to the grass

Wherever I was headed

The urgency dissolved

I become Summer,

Laughing under the willow,

Supine on the squishy blades,

Hands to belly,

Bare-feet dangling up to sky

Whatever I am doing

with my one Wild and Precious life

I know that I am Alive,

That I am more than enough

to just be alive to humbly greet Her

Accepting my desires and my fears

Blessed be intimacy

**inspired by the poem 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?

—Mary Oliver