In her lovely poem, The Summer Day, Mary Oliver reflects on the transience and wonder of life and offers the following words:

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? [full text]

The answer, of course, is yes, which is why Ms. Oliver encourages the reader to join her in joyfully embracing their “one wild and precious life.” Her words have resonance because of the inherent impermanence of all living things. None remain untouched by mortality. And though the anticipation of its touch can at times evoke anxiety and distress, it is a comfort of sorts to know that one may live on in some fashion, whether through one’s progeny or one’s works. The poems of Mary Oliver will in all likelihood be read and cherished long after she shuffles off this mortal coil, for she is among the pantheon of great artists and thinkers. The same might be said of the late Carl Sagan, who, more than a decade after his passing, manages to speak to us anew today, as reported here by the New York Times:

A Familiar and Prescient Voice, Brought to Life

It’s been a long 10 years since we’ve heard Carl Sagan beckoning us to consider the possibilities inherent in the “billions� of stars peppering the sky and in the “billions� of neuronal connections spiderwebbing our brains.

In the day, the Cornell astronomer, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of books like “The Dragons of Eden,� “Contact,� “Pale Blue Dot� and “The Demon-Haunted World,� impresario of the PBS program “Cosmos� and Johnny Carson regular was one of the world’s most famous and eloquent unbelievers, an apostle of cosmic wonder, critic of nuclear arms and a champion of science’s duty to probe and question without limit, including the claims of religion. He died of pneumonia after a series of bone marrow transplants in December 1996.

In his absence, the public discourse on his favorite issues — the fate of the planet, the beauty and mystery of the cosmos — has not fared well. The teaching of evolution in public schools has become a bitter bone of contention; NASA tried to abandon the Hubble Space Telescope and censor talk of climate change; and of course, religious fanatics crashed jetliners into the World Trade Center, leading to a war in the Middle East that has awakened memories in some corners of the Crusades.

Now, however, Dr. Sagan has rejoined the cosmic debate from the grave. The occasion is the publication in November of “The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God� (Penguin). The book is based on a series of lectures exploring the boundary between science and religion that Dr. Sagan gave in Glasgow in 1985, and it was edited by Ann Druyan, his widow and collaborator.

Reading Dr. Sagan’s new book is like running into an old friend at a noisy party, discovering he still has all his hair, and repairing to the den for a quiet, congenial drink.

“I would suggest that science is, at least in part, informed worship,� he writes at the beginning of a discussion that includes the history of cosmology, a travel guide to the solar system, the reason there are hallucinogen receptors in the brain, and the meaning of the potential discovery — or lack thereof — of extraterrestrial intelligence.

Never afraid to venture into global politics, Dr. Sagan warns at one point of the danger that a leader under the sway of religious fundamentalism might not try too hard to avoid nuclear Armageddon, reasoning that it was God’s plan.

“He might be interested to see what that would be like,� Dr. Sagan wrote. “Why slow it down?�

Almost in the same breath, Dr. Sagan acknowledges that religion can engender hope and speak truth to power, as in the civil rights movement in the United States, but that it rarely does.

It’s curious, he says, that no allegedly Christian nation has adopted the Golden Rule as a basis for foreign policy. Rather, in the nuclear age, mutually assured destruction was the policy of choice. “Christianity says that you should love your enemy. It certainly doesn’t say that you should vaporize his children.� [full text]