February 25, 2007
Consulting Interim Minister Myron Andes

Your One Wild and Precious Life

          For this service I asked four people to respond to the final question in Mary Oliver’s poem, The Summer Day:

“…what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”

(The complete poem can be found at http://www.loc.gov/poetry/180/133.html.)

Their fascinating and inspiring answers, included here, show the depth and breadth of spiritual reflection among the members and friends of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Evansville.

Thank you to Meme Lahanis, Dana Granholm, Chris Norrington and Becky McDonald for their thoughtful and heartfelt reflections.

May you each fully embrace your one wild and precious life!

Myron Andes

Meme Lahanis

My one wild and precious life.

What will I do with my one wild and precious life? That has been a question I have been asking myself for the last seven years. Looking back over the course of my life, I have felt the need to do something different and more meaningful. I had gotten into a rut of working two jobs to make ends meet and going out on the weekends with friends and socializing. But I kept thinking there was more to life than really hard work and fun.

I started to read books about spirituality. I had fallen of out of going to church back in my teens and I began to reignite my spirituality. About this time the church that I attend in Louisville began to come to Evansville as a mission church. The priest would come 2-3 times in the month to hold services. One of the major obstacles I had faced with the Orthodox Church is the language barrier. Ninety percent of the service liturgy is spoken and sung in Greek. Growing up in a Greek home where Greek was spoken, I still did not fully grasp the language. So a lot was missed in my translation. The new priest Father Patrick was a convert to the religion, so he understood. In Evansville the Mission would do the service in ninety percent English. The difference in my understanding was incredible. For the first time in my life I was able to understand and enjoy fully the words of the church.

But my hunger and yearning didn’t stop. I was in the pursuit of discovery…trying to find my way in life’s ever-difficult journey. I had always wanted to pursue a college degree. I found a program that would enable me to work full time plus do my extra work as well. I was on the fast pace in a Liberal Arts degree from U of E. I graduated in three years and still was not finished with my educational goals. So I went forward with my Masters of Science in Public Service Administration.

Since accomplishing my educational goals you would think I would be content. However, I still felt the need to help the community. Volunteering was the answer for me. I have joined three organizations and volunteer two–three nights a week. So I am on my way!!

I have attained my educational and spiritual goals and now I am working on my personal goals. I would like to get married to the man I love. At this point in my life I am not sure if children are an option for me, but I would like to think so. I also have travel goals and I would like to visit every continent before I breathe my last breath. So far I have five more to go!! Plus visit all the interesting places in this country…. As David keeps telling me to add it to the growing list!!

I have learned in my life’s journey that everywhere you are led, more golden opportunities are waiting for you to grasp and make a reality. 

Dana Granholm

With My Wild and Precious Life

It is with great care that I choose my words when musing about what I want to get out of life, because surely that is the one thing closest to my heart. And when I think about all the things that I want to do I realize that my list would be rather long, though I’d hope not too boring. So, how best to fit all of my hopes and dreams onto one small paper? Well it becomes much easier when I think of what is most important to me.

Three things: I want to always be able to look back on my life from any point in time and be content with what I’ve done, with no regrets. I want to be able to cheerfully apply myself to any task and live for that moment in time. And I want to constantly look forward to what secrets the future holds.

Doing all three of these things on a daily basis sounds like it takes an inhuman abundance of optimism. But, truly, it isn’t that hard. By living life to what I understand to be its fullest potential, I ensure that I won’t regret anything. By remembering that one can find joy in any task, I can plod on quite happily no matter how muddied I find the trail of my life. And by setting myself up for a successful life through school, through my choices of friends, through how I treat others, I give myself more to look forward to each day.

My life won’t always be easy to be happy with. I accept this as a part of life, because no one said it was gonna be easy. But each day, especially the bad ones, I take a little time to stop and smell the roses, because, isn’t that what life is all about? Reading a book, writing a poem, listening to music, dreaming, laughing, loving, everybody needs a little something in their life that they truly enjoy, including me, despite me professing my satisfaction with all things.

I’m living my dream of happiness, past, present, and future. And if living the dream isn’t enough reason to smile, I don’t know what is. 

Chris Norrington 

When Myron asked me to speak today on what is my plan to do with my wild and precious life, I read Mary Oliver’s poem and was thinking about what to say.

Pondering about her words, and how doing a simple thing such as watching a grasshopper being a form of meditation or prayer made me realize that the things that I do everyday may be my way of praying. Growing up I was very academic and a “good” child never causing my parents any problems. Until I went to live in Europe, and came home after my year abroad with pierced ears, bleached spiky hair, holes in my jeans, combat boots, and an attitude that before my transformation I was not actually living, but existing. I became wild. And now that I am on the other side of forty, I look at the precious side more than I would like. With age comes responsibility, so I found ways of making my life and other people’s more precious by becoming involved in the community.

I started volunteering for non-profit organizations such as ARG, the Public Library Friends, and the United Caring Shelter. Being associated with our Social Justice program and the generosity that we show with our time and money inspires me every day to do something to help others. So much so that maybe a new career path for me would be to actually get paid for something I love to do: help people and organizations.

This past Christmas when I was shopping for a gift for the family that our church sponsored from the AIDS Holiday Project, after reading Oliver’s poem, I look back now and realize that what I was doing is a form of prayer for me. I am the person watching that grasshopper, thinking about where did everything come from, and where is everything going. Then I remember those summer evenings when we would catch lightning bugs and watch them crawl among the reeds of grass we had put in a jar after my grandfather had poked holes in the lid. And I realized I had done it all along, even as a child. I had been thinking about my wild and precious life, and I just didn’t know it.

Becky McDonald

What is it I plan to do with my one wild and precious life?

I plan to enjoy it, to take it as it comes and not to make it what I want it to be. I do believe it’s important for me to know what I want, and I can hope for what I want and maybe even do some planning. But trying to make what I want happen has always gotten me into trouble. Soul trouble. And now that I know a little more about my soul, I know a little more about how to stay out of soul trouble.

It’s always been easier for me to know what I don’t want than to know what I do want. Knowing what doesn’t work is important, but it keeps the focus on the problem, the negative. I’m trying to focus on the positive, the solution. And that soul knowledge I talked about has helped me to know more about the solution – for me.

So, I do want to enjoy this one wild and precious life. I do want it to be wild and I want it to be precious. I like the way Mary Oliver says that – wild and precious. Wild conjures up images of taking off down the road at the drop of a hat, or dancing to loud music in a long line of others doing the same step, or sitting in a darkened theatre and laughing out loud then minutes later weeping with empathy.

Wild is conversations that go deep, whether with a long-time friend or a new acquaintance. I understand there is a place for small talk, but I like for it to be used sparingly. It’s new and unusual food, experimenting and sometimes getting that intense pleasure that can only come from the sense of taste. It’s finding a new author that someone recommended, or that simply jumped off the shelf at the library, whose writing moves me so much that I have to frequently pause between paragraphs just to take it all in. I want this wild life to be an adventure, to move me and to interest me.

And I want this life to be precious. I want to see clearly that this life is precious – everything about it is precious – everything. I’ve come to understand in the past several years that it is precisely the things that I haven’t planned that are the things I need the most. The things that I need, to learn what I need to know. And these things that have seemed so wrong and have been so painful have turned out to be so full of joy and meaning and have resulted in so much growth. That’s really what I want, to grow and to change and to learn and to become and to reach. But then, what do I know?