summertime

Mary Oliver, “The Summer Day”
The Summer Day

POETIC THEMES:
Schoooool’s out. for. summer! 21st be damned, it’s summertime. To see the extravagance, the unabashed pomp with which nature shakes out her feathers in early summer is to hear the call to be present. This poem begins with a question about God, and ends with another question - Mary Oliver's most famous lines. We don’t need to know who made all this, we just have to commit to feeling it, moment by moment. This might be called the manifesto for the religion of Oliver’s oeuvre as a whole - a kind of agnostic worship of what is. And I do mean worship in its etymological sense - the sense of worthiness, what is worthy of our attention. The poem is not about a summer’s day, it's entitled THE Summer’s Day. This one you’re in. 
Side note about the general versus the specific, as it pertains to another famous poem about spirituality. The most well-known haiku ever written is by Basho, in which a frog jumps into a pond and makes a splash. It's generally agreed that the pond is an analogy for the meditation mind, and the frog jump the arrival of a thought or other disturbance. The translation into English is the subject of endless debate. Is the poem's focus on the water, the jumping frog, or the effect (in ripple or sound)? Do we translate with a pond or the pond? A frog, or the frog? (Basho's Many English Frogs) Answers to this question reveal different understandings of mindfulness. For Oliver, the still water of the mind isn't the point - it's the music of what splashes in. The rhythm of noticing each thing is, for Oliver, spiritual. Present-tense noticing. 
And indeed another repeated word in this poem's description of this grasshopper is "now" - the first word of Patanjali's Yoga Sutras. The first of his 196 aphorisms reads, "Now, the discipline of yoga." Again, there are many translation debates. But one interpretation is that to inhabit the present moment fully, attentively, is yoga. 
Mary Oliver calls herself a “praise poet,” and American transcendentalism finds its 21st century expression in her poems. She distills her message with quotable quotes like “Attention is the beginning of devotion." It would be hard for her to have been more explicit: “Instructions for living a life:/ Pay attention./ Be astonished./Tell about it” (from the poem "Sometimes"). We pay attention, like cash money, we give it. We devote our attention, the most precious of gifts.  
In this same explicit vein, she specifies that this is not just any grasshopper, it’s this one. And repeats "The one who" twice more. Every one of us is as strange and complicated as this grasshopper’s eyes. Ours is not all human life, it’s this one we’re living. And Oliver’s famous second person address to discern what it is you will do with yours is exportable to every calling that brings us into the immediacy of what we are meant to be and do in this world of ours. We are challenged to fall down and surrender to that calling, to offer our lives like a prayer.
The central line of the poem, cutting it down the middle, confesses, "I don't know exactly what a prayer is." And in this poem, prayer turns out to be falling down in the grass, kneeling down, bowing to this earth of ours. 


PHYSICAL THEMES
We could examine the grasshopper’s specific movements, but that’s not really the point here. The grasshopper is one object of attention, and we are called to find our own. The crucial verbs here are falling down, kneeling down, as a physical expression of worship, in the sense of “worthiness” mentioned above. There are indeed, in the words of her beloved Rumi (or at least the Rumi she grew to love through her friend Coleman Bark's translations), a hundred ways to kneel and kiss the ground: “Do you bow your head when you pray or do you look up into that blue space? Take your choice, prayers fly in all directions.” (Huffington Post article) So in this practice we’ll anchor our attention - quite literally, anchoring our attention to the earth - by practicing down dirty, in the grass. “Grass” is a noun mentioned no fewer than 5 times in this relatively short poem, and movements that concretely engage grass are fun to explore. Key to this honing of attentive curiosity is to stay spontaneous with what is drawing our regard, heeding the natural wandering of the observing mind. So after exploring the nearest grassy domain, be sure to take some time to just be.