“Tell me. What do you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”
~Mary Oliver

On Wednesday afternoon I sat in a theater to watch the Tony award winning musical ‘Once’. It is the story of an Irish musician who has lost his passion and motivation. He meets a young Czech woman, also a musician, who is full of enthusiasm for music and
living. It was a movie I had loved and I was excited to see this expanded version of a very simple story. While telling the tale of these two musicians, the play also tells the story of changing times, what it means to be a person displaced from their country of origin and the ways in which people create community to sustain themselves. It is a simple story but full of many thoughtful, imperative life lessons.

At the very beginning of the play, when the young man and woman meet, the man is about to walk away from his guitar, give up his pursuit of being a musician, the one thing about which he is passionate but cannot make a living or get a break. The young woman who is poor and does not own a piano has found a way of continuing to play by befriending the owner of a music store. On her lunch hour, she goes into his shop and plays to the owner’s delight and those who wander into the store. When the young woman encounters the young man, she asks him two questions:” Are you proud to be Irish?” and “Do you love your life?” These are two questions that bring him up short and steer his life on a different course.

After seeing this production, I thought mightily about these two questions. Am I proud to be who I am, where I’m from? Do I love my life? I thought about what would happen to each of us if we asked ourselves these questions every day. How would it change the nature of what we do with the precious hours and minutes through which we move? The young woman in ‘Once’ pointed out that to be Irish meant that this man was a part of countless poets, musicians and writers that have found a home on a tiny island in the middle of the sea. “What are the chances of that?” she asked. Each of us are also cut from some fabric woven in a landscape into which we were born or from which our ancestors hailed. It shapes us and gives meaning to who we are if we pay attention to it. This weaving can tell us much about who we are if we allow it. Are you proud to be from your own landscape?

And then there was the second question that nagged at me. Do I love my life? Do you? Do I love the waking up and the going to sleep of my days? Do you? Do I love the moving through the world that I do every day? Do you? If not, what do I plan to do about it? What do you?

In the play ‘Once’ the young man found that once he gave himself to the landscape in which he was born and lived into his passionate love of making music, he fell in love with his life again. Being a Broadway show, he also fell in love with the girl. But that only happened at the end, when the curtain went down. What happened in the two hours before was the real story.

Of course this was just a play meant to entertain and give those of us present a relief from the incredible heat of the afternoon. But those two questions, those two important questions, have accompanied my waking and my sleeping hours. They seem like good ones to ponder for awhile. Maybe they will inspire me like they did the young man to hold onto my life with both hands. To hold on. To claim it. To love it. To live it.