The Summer Day
This column originally appeared in the July 4th and 5th edition of the Courier in Russellville, AR
Mary Oliver’s 1990 poem “The Summer Day” explores the ways that idleness can be a part of prayer, that noticing and enjoying the world around us is a good enough way to spend our life. It ends with these lines: “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?”
Oliver is a poet best known for her hopeful reflections and observations of the natural world, in which her speakers spend their time looking and listening. In getting to the point, she has another poem titled, “The Real Prayers Are Not the Words, But the Attention that Comes First.” For a woman fond of supposed idleness, she wrote and published a great number of books. Fifteen books of poetry across her lifetime. She died in 2019.
I am often thinking about Mary Oliver, I find myself turning to her collected works, “Devotions”, when I am in need of hope, or a reminder of how to be still. Over the last couple of years though, that last line from “The Summer Day” has become a call to action for me, rather than one of stillness.
I left Arkansas four weeks ago, the trunk of my car weighed down with suitcases and boxes I’d packed the night before, so I could slip out of the house at six am. “Devotions” was in the box with me. I drove east, heading into the sunrise, bound for Tennessee. This is the second summer I’ve made the trip “up the Mountain” from Russellville to Sewanee, where I am currently attending a six-week writing intensive as part of my graduate program for my Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing.
The mountain top where I was heading is remote. Sewanee might generously be described as a village and the University of the South is the only game in town. The university owns the land, some thirteen thousand acres worth. The campus is verdant and sprawling. Also, old. Originally founded in 1856 and modeled after the much older universities in Oxford and Cambridge, the campus is full of quarry cut stones and echoing halls. There are bell towers and chapels with ornate stained glass. Down the road is a retreat center that used to be a convent. If you were to travel down the mountain, another hour east would land you in Chattanooga. Nashville is about two hours north. I don’t know if Mary Oliver ever came here, but I know she would have loved it.
When I left last year, my stomach fluttered with anxiety and trepidation and the particularly leaden feeling of leaving my daughter while she was still sleeping. There were many things I thought about in the eight hours I spent in the car on my first trip to the then unknown campus in the Smokey Mountains and the guilt of leaving my daughter until she joined me later was not least among them. I drove through Tennessee with a nervous excitement, wondering what would happen, questioning what I was doing.
This year I felt buoyant for my return to campus. I was excited for the work and confident that the two weeks my daughter would spend without me would not inalterably ruin our relationship. This is the freedom of doing something for the second time, a different freedom from the permission to give something new a try.
In the six weeks we have on campus, we do an entire semester’s worth of graduate level workshops. This is not idleness though I am often still. I am writing and editing so much that my hands hurt. The residential nature, the breakneck pace of instruction, and the far-flung lives of the others in my cohort mean that it is graduate school, but tinged with a quality like an artsy, grown-up summer camp. I spend my days in class and my mornings writing. If I have time in the evenings after doing my work, I sit with others in my cohort and talk about all the reading and writing we are doing. Sometimes I walk beneath the trees or sit and watch the birds which are numerous, but not so different from the ones in Arkansas. I am thinking, always, of the work. This program is one of the most difficult and satisfying things I’ve ever done.
If you would like to ask me why I am doing this—why I am uprooting my family and my life, putting schoolwork on top of my regular work, talking about things few people care about in a place few people have heard of—you may rest assured you are not alone. When I tell people that I’m in a graduate program for writing the usual response is a quizzical look and a baffled “Why?” I am not always sure how to answer this. Where should I start?
I was always a book smart kind of person and good at school. My younger self took it for granted that I would go on and do more school after college, eventually. It took me more than a decade out of undergraduate to get around to it. But that’s not really why I’m doing it.
When I finish the program and have my master’s, likely in two or three years, I will be qualified to teach at the college level. It is unlikely I will find work at a college or university without publications or without a doctoral degree. If I work very hard, I might have turned one of the projects I’m working on into something someone wants to publish. Most likely, I will still have years of work ahead of me before I have a book ready. Which is to say, my prospects after this program are not much different than there were before.
The truth is, I am doing this to be a better writer. Because I value the education for what it does for me personally; I value it for the experience within it, not just the outcomes. I am in Tennessee because I have decided that the things that matter to me are allowed to shape my one wild and precious life. I am doing this because I want to.
What else should I have done?
