Sometimes a short phrase from a poem or a hymn jumps out and presents itself to me as if I’d never seen or heard it before.  Today, listening to the Chancel Choir in church sing an arrangement of Love Divine,  the lines “lost in wonder” grabbed my attention. It wasn’t a “Lost in Yonkers” sort of thing... The Neil Simon play always gives me a lot to think about when I see it or reread it... but “lost in wonder” launched a fresh way of beginning a discussion with myself about what “being lost” means.  Perhaps I didn’t get Mary Oliver’s challenge out of my system (yesterday’s BLOG writing): “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” 

I like being lost in wonder... lost in the appreciation of being alive, of actually having my very own wild and precious life.  I like the fact that I am discovering in my old age that life continues to be  “wild and precious.”  I often wonder when I’m smack in the middle of doing something or thinking something if I would have liked doing or thinking whatever it is I’m doing or thinking when I was a young man.  When I was younger would I have approved some idea that I now fearlessly defend and find intriguing.   I wrote yesterday that I like Mary Oliver for all sorts of reasons. She and I are the same age.  I wonder if Mary would have thought to write “Tom Dancer’s Gift of a Whitebark Pine Cone” when she was twenty; and I wonder, if she had written it then and I had read it, would I have been repulsed by the notion of eating a pine cone that had passed through the digestive system of a bear... I wonder if I would have wrinkled my nose at the suggestion... would I have missed the point of her poem?  

Here’s the poem.  I’m thinking about it... lost in wonder.

Tom Dancer’s Gift of a Whitebark Pine Cone
Mary Oliver

You never know what opportunity is going to travel to you, or through

you.

Once a friend gave me a small pine cone-one of a few he found in the 

scat

of a grizzly in Utah maybe, or Wyoming.  I took it home

and did what I supposed he was sure I would do-

I ate it, thinking

how it had traveled through that rough and holy body. It was crisp and

sweet.

It was almost a prayer without words.  My gratitude to you, Tom Dancer,

for this gift of the world I adore so much and want to belong to.  And

thank you too, great bear.