If you are exhausted from the effort of making your life work because you are a square peg and all the holes are round, if more than anything you would like to just drop the rope and relax into your place in the world sometimes, maybe this poem will speak to you like it does to me. It sounds a lot better when my sixty something year old best friend Ginger reads it in her chain-smoking voice, but still...
Wild Geese
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting --
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
~ Mary Oliver ~
I absolutely love this. I copied down part of this years ago in a book I used to keep of poems and pieces of poems and just random sentences I had read that seemed to raise the hair on my neck for one reason or another. Thank you for reminding me of it. And thank you for reminding me WHY I loved it. I love square pegs.
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