Is Your Plan Better Than The Grasshopper?

(We caught a huge grasshopper and released it into the wild. Today, I did not see the grasshopper but I saw the leaves being eaten again.)

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 downinto 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 in New and Selected Poems (Boston: Beacon Press) 1992


I echo: what is your plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

- Ghostwise

The Dragonfly With Its Million Eyes.

(As I alighted from my car, I thought about the Butterfly post I wrote last night. I don't know why it made me think of dragonfly. Surprisingly and coincidentally, I saw a dying dragonfly lying in front of my office. It was still twitching. Seeing it like that made me sad.)

Deep in the sun-searched growths the dragonfly
Hangs like a blue thread loosened from the sky.

- Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Silent Noon


I once saw hundreds of dragonflies hovering over me on a promontory jutting out into the ocean in Southern China. Until that day, I thought the mass of dragonflies pictured in Japanese cartoons are works of fiction for I had never seen so many before with my own eyes.

- Ghostwise

~~~~~~~~~~"

This dragonfly came up to me. He was hovering right in front of my face, and I was really examining him, thinking, How does he see me? I became enlightened.

- Ziggy Marley


He saw me with a million eyes.

- Ghostwise