I read Isabel Allende's memoir, Paula, with my college students twenty years ago, a memoir written for and at the bedside of her dying daughter, Paula. She wrote for months as Paula lay in a coma: "Listen, Paula," the book begins, "I am going to tell you a story, so that when you wake, you will not feel so lost."
"What is truer than truth?.....The Story."
This morning, I listened to another Ted Talk by Allende--on how to live passionately no matter your age. At 71, she asks the questions: "What have I lost in the last decade?" And "What have I gained?"
https://www.ted.com/talks/isabelle_allende_how_to_live_passionately_no_matter_your_age
Isabel Allende--like Mary Oliver, like Maya Angelou, like so many vibrant writers I've known and loved--is a spokesperson for living a full and passionate life. The last two lines in "The Summer Day" run like a mantra in my mind every day:
The 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 down
into 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
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