"wild and precious life"

These days I feel so alive. As Thelma says, in my favorite movie Thelma and Louise, "I feel awake! I don't remember ever feelin' this awake!"

I can't even explain the feeling... it's emotional, physiological, spiritual... both ecstatic and agonizing. I feel both raw and energized... I feel unstoppable. And there's a sense of serenity that comes with all of this as well; it's a sense of assurance that this is genuine, this is life.

The final two lines of the poem are perhaps the wisest words I've heard strung together, and I want to ask myself this question every morning and most moments of everyday!

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The Summer Day

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?

http://www.loc.gov/poetry/180/133.html

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Until next time, I remain the amorphous fuchsia dye that's waiting to stain skin between your fingers