Blue Jays (16/30)

I woke up this morning and flung open all the windows and doors first thing. It is a near perfect Sunday morning: crisp, clear, quiet. It's the kind of day you want to welcome into your home...into your life. I am sitting here with my first cup of coffee enjoying the wide open spaces: both literal and figurative. Today's possibilities are dreamy and vast. I have the gift of a day bookmarked between this slow start and the worn in like your favorite jeans comfort of family time. My sitting in...the silence and stillness have just been blatantly interrupted. I hear my kids closing the doors I moments ago opened. There is such a raucous in the air. It's the jays that call the perimeter of our yard home. The sound they are alarming conjures of Hitchcock's The Birds. It's a shrill sounding shriek that has the same effect as nails on a chalkboard. They are flying in a frenzied formation. If ever there was an angry bird, the jay it is. This morning it appears they are sounding off and showing force against a hawk in the vicinity. A hungry hawk nest raiding for breakfast. This morning he'll have to look elsewhere.

This is another Mary Oliver morning.

The Summer Day

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?