Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?If you can't think of what to write, think about what the following mean to you:
- How do you find purpose and meaning in life?
- "What is it all about?"
- Peace? How can you find it (not easy)
- Interpersonal connections? What kind, and why?
- Family? Kids? Why would you want to do that?
- Work that is satisfying, work that makes a difference? How?
- Spirituality? What does that mean to you?
- Feeling one with Nature?
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A LESSON BEFORE DYING
Create a Google Doc with an example sentence for each of the ten words in chapter 10.
I've listed three sentences but you only have to have one.
1. Autonomy=the quality or state of being self-governing
Ex. 1:Having autonomy gives you the right to live your life without consulting others.
Ex. 2: While the federal government has a great deal of power, it has given states some autonomy to govern themselves
Ex. 3: A good boss will provide her workers with the autonomy necessary to create their own ideal working conditions.
2. Bureaucratic=associated with a lengthy and tiresome process for performing a task
Ex. Because of bureaucratic red tape, it will be months before I receive my passport.
Ex. 2: Bureaucratic mistakes allowed a wrongly imprisoned man to stay in jail for over three months before he was finally freed.
Ex. 3: Although my boss sits directly across from me at work, I still have to follow the bureaucratic policy of requesting vacation days online
3. Mandate=official permission
Ex. Our military troops do not have a mandate that allows them to cross into neighboring countries without consent from the nations.
Quotes from A Lesson Before Dying
"Don’t tell me to believe. Don’t tell me to believe in the same God or laws that men believe in who commit these murders. Don’t tell me to believe that God can bless this country and that men are judged by their peers . . . Yet they must believe. They must believe, if only to free the mind, if not the body. Only when the mind is free has the body a chance to be free" (p. 251)
" . . . a butterfly, a yellow butterfly with dark specks like n dots on its wings . . . What had brought it there? . . . Why did it light on a hill of bull grass that offered it nothing? I watched it closely, the way it opened its wings and closed the, the way it opened its wings again, fluttered, closed itw wings for a second or two, then opened them again and flew away."
Similar to Mary Oliver's poem The Summer Day
The Summer 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
