What is it You Plan to do with Your One Wild and Precious Life?

Don’t ask me why, as a teenager, I decided to buy a wooden cane at a store just outside of Gatlinburg, Tennessee.  I don’t know why.  Maybe I saw it as the world’s cutest hiking stick.  Maybe I just thought it was cool.  I certainly didn’t need it.

But now, some twenty-five years later, that cane remains one of the few things from my childhood that I still have—oh, and the stories it could tell.

I used it as a prop in one of my theater classes in high school when I acted out two monologues from the play Shadowlands, portraying both Joy Gresham and C.S. Lewis.

A few years ago, when my vertigo was particularly violent, I used the cane daily to get me across the parking lot to check my mail.

And today, I used the cane to leave my own message in the sand at the beach.

This summer, locally, people have been leaving rocks around the county with messages painted on them.  I, myself, found a shell a few weeks ago, in the sand, at the beach, with the word “breathe” on it.  Sometimes people pick up the rocks and shells and place them elsewhere for someone else to find.  But the morning I found the shell, I left it where it was.   I could think of no better home for it than the beach.

And last week, I found a Bible verse scrawled in the sand, greeting everyone who walked down the boardwalk to the beach, to walk or to surf as the sun was rising.

Sometime last night it occurred to me that I could leave my own message in the sand, not necessarily a Bible verse, but something nature related, something spiritual and so I pulled out my Mary Oliver poetry and began looking.

If you have not read Mary Oliver, do so today.  She is a kindred spirit to everyone who has simply stepped outside and discovered God in the ocean, in the sky, in the sunrise, in the herons, in the dirt beneath your feet.

And so last night I discovered (or maybe rediscovered) her poem “The Summer Day” and the question that ends it: “ … what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”

I have never written in the sand before and there is an art to it, I discovered this morning.  I needed sand that had not yet been walked on.  I needed sand that was slightly damp and compacted otherwise the walls of each letter collapsed on themselves.  I needed to write block letters.  I needed to write as I did as a child, each letter in pieces, because writing one letter in one stroke was too hard.  I needed patience.

(And yes, I realize I altered her words slightly—blame my post-forty-year-old memory.)

After I finished writing, I took a few pictures, then picked up my cane and knapsack (filled with Mary Oliver books and my two cameras) and headed down the beach.  I wondered as I walked how long my message would last before someone trampled it or the tide washed it away.  I wondered if anyone would read it.  I wondered if it mattered.  Who was I writing for? 

Wasn’t that message really for me?