Always a Bright Spot: Blip 600

Six hundred blips is not an "official" Blipfoto event, but it's still one I want to mark. The past few months have been difficult for me, with a series of health issues requiring investigation and treatment, and uncertainty prevailing. Thankfully, those concerns are now all resolved, with nothing seriously wrong being found.

During those dark months, blipping was a bright spot each day that kept my creative juices bubbling, my focus in the here and now, and my thoughts on those I've come to consider my friends in this unique community.

That daily bright spot meant a lot to me then, and still does. We are here to make connections in images and words, gracing each other with shared glimpses into our "wild and precious" lives, rejoicing together in the good times and supporting each other in the hard ones. May it always be so.


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?

-- Mary Oliver
(New and Selected Poems, Beacon Press, 1992)