Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?
These words, shouted by motivational speakers, activists, and valedictorians in every graduation speech written since they were first published in 1990, ignite a fire in people. And they should. But perhaps not in the out-of-context way that many well-intentioned people use them.
Mary Oliver mostly wrote poems about nature, about idleness, about solitude, about being so obsessed with the earth that she would sleep like a stone on the forest floor.
Her poem “The Summer Day,” the one from which the wild and precious line comes, is another of these nature paeans. She describes holding a grasshopper in her hand, its delicate and alien features, and then watching it fly away.
She speaks of strolling through fields all day and, just before delivering the most motivational of all motivational quotes, asks also “Tell me, what else should I have done?”
In this poem, Oliver is asking why she should be productive. She is advocating for her right to do nothing on a beautiful summer’s day but be outside and free.
We all know this feeling: we are cooped indoors working while a spectacular day rages outside our window. This is the way I felt back when I worked in the basement of a concrete behemoth, glued to a screen in my cube, and then would hear whispers, like the patter of rain, that there was a storm outside.
I used to run up the stairs for my break, hoping to catch a few drops on the toes of my dress shoes as I stood under the awning at the edge of the parking lot, smelling the sharp mix of petrichor and gas fumes. I love rain. That was my grasshopper, that was my wild and precious moment.
Eventually I ran away from the office building and stepped into the rainforest to become a national park ranger in Alaska. The Mary Oliver of this poem would have approved.
Productivity, ambition, seizing the moment–these things are all well and good. But this particular quote, like much of Oliver’s writing, is not about those things. Oliver was telling us to lay down our work sometimes, and just be the wild thing we were made to be.
She lays out this message in another poem, one of my favorites, “Black Oaks.”
Listen, says ambition, nervously shifting her weight from
one boot to another — why don’t you get going?
For there I am, in the mossy shadows, under the trees.
And to tell the truth I don’t want to let go of the wrists
of idleness, I don’t want to sell my life for money,
I don’t even want to come in out of the rain.
I for one find it inspiring that even Oliver, the queen of spinning away your days in nature, also had inner voices that ordered her to be ambitious, to be productive, to do do do at all costs.
Our society pounds these messages into us from birth: always grind, do not rest. Idleness is considered “wasting time.” We internalize these messages and repeat them to ourselves. Even Oliver did.
The beauty of her poetry, though, is that she fought them. She heard the motivational speakers urging her to do something in her head, and she pushed against them, told them no, thank you, I will not give in. My time is not wasted; it is precious. And with it, I choose to be wild.