In her brave, reflective book This One Wild and Precious Life: The Path Back to Reconnection in a Fractured World (2020), Australian author Sarah Wilson calls the reader to embrace a more meaningful modern life—one in which we care more about our fellow human beings and our shared, beautiful planet in crisis.

The book’s title is inspired by a line from a poem by the late American poet Mary Oliver (1935-2019), whose poignant work observing nature won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1984. In ‘The Summer Day’ (1992), Oliver reflects on a day spent in nature, musing at the marvels of the natural world.

It’s a poem of rhetorical questions, pondering existence and faith, but it ends on a bold challenge to the reader, posing the one question to ask yourself today—and every day of this life you are lucky to live.

The Summer Day
by Mary Oliver

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?