April Prompts for Your Wild & Precious Life

Nothing is too corny, nothing is too obvious, everything is possible

A friend and I were texting about Mary Oliver, and what a bummer it is that her poems—clear-eyed, strangely simple, decadently open-hearted—have been quoted so often and so deeply out of context that they’re kinda meaningless. It’s hard to take anything seriously when it’s printed in fake-handwriting script on coffee mugs sold at TJ Maxx and reposted by Vuori ** to pad the drip between 15% off codes.

It just sucks because Mary was a freak!, he wrote. Then: Respectfully.

She was, though. There’s something so alive in her outlook. An outsider walking the woods alone, writing about geese, believing in the holiness of moss and the ethics of joy. She presciently recognized that attention was a currency, and that it must be earned, in fact: “it is our endless and proper work.” Even her most cornball hypothetical, “What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” reflects holding mortality at arm’s length, unafraid to point out what we all, inevitably, have in common.

** I do…