this.

I have this thought rolling around in my head. And it is this.

When I first read the last lines of Mary Oliver's poem 'The Summer Day',

"Tell me, what is it you plan to do

with your one wild and precious life?"

I was taken by the description more than the question.

Wild and precious.

Yes, life is indeed both.

When I had my cancer diagnosis (in 2019), it was my first real reckoning with my mortality and Mary's words took on a different weight.

But today, on my 51st birthday, it's my answer to her question that has been bouncing around my brain.

And the answer is this.

This.

Yep, just that.

I plan to do this with my one wild and precious life. Just exactly this.

Sure I'd love to win that 50/50 draw I bought tickets for at the Blue Jays game. And if given the choice, I would definitely do without deerflies and loved ones forced into their own unwelcome cancer battles.

But my answer is still this.

I say this from the midst of another season of grief. These seem to last too long and come too frequent these days. Fighting to find breathing space as the walls of pending loss press in. Fatigue that settles like mist on the water of a cool fall morning.

Grief that can, as @theangrytherapist says, split you open.

But in the same pondering he doesn't want happiness to be his North Star. He wants aliveness. The whole thing. The sunrise and the funeral. The kiss and the rejection. The ocean and the hospital room. The belly laugh and the ugly cry.

Reminds me, in part, of meliorism. Not optimism, as in it will all work out. But meliorism, the idea that there is sufficient goodness, and enough possibility, to make our efforts worthwhile. How life doesn't have to be perfect to be wonderful.

And of Anne Lamott's 'mixed grille' musings: how when things are good we find ourselves often happy and when things are bad, we can be remarkably resilient. But when they're both (a mixed grille), we become big whiny babies.

I've had more than a few big whiny moments as of late.

And yet, isn't life usually a mixed grille?

Delight and suffering, right alongside one another. Sometimes, I think, we suppress the delight because of the suffering. Maybe joy can feel disloyal when someone we love, or we ourselves, are hurting.

I want to measure my days not by how happy they were, but by how alive I was. By how I accepted the mixed grille that life imposes and by how I found agency to make joy while not denying the hard.

So, this.

This wild and precious life that has me paddling to campsites of exposed Canadian Shield sun-warmed on a summer's afternoon.

Dogs to love and caterpillars to watch become chrysalises and then butterflies.

A companion who makes my gardening dreams come true and will sleep in a tent with me and paint me images of places I love.

Family to kick my ass at Settlers and go to ball games with.

Friends that add buoyancy when things get heavy.

The call of the loon that turns my thoughts to my Dad.

The nervy-ness of forging yet another career shift alongside the confidence that it will take shape.

What feels like a million moves from province to province, state to state.

More adventures than I can count.

This.

This is what I plan to do with my one wild and precious life.