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.

This poem brings tears to my eyes every time I read it. Tears that don’t express sadness, but a lost empathy for myself that I feared I might never find, but am so relieved to have recovered.

The line, ‘you do not have to be good,’ is a firm commandment from a holy place, like a hot spring, or a mountain top. You don’t need to spend your life repaying a cosmic debt, reaching perfection, or proving a thing to any God, parent, or ideal. Don’t make life harder than it has to be. Why walk on your knees through the desert repenting when you could happily stroll on your feet through the woods?

‘Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. Meanwhile the world goes on.’ Our problems are put into perspective when we place them in a larger context—the rain turns sharp rocks into smooth pebbles, the sun dries up the puddles. Feel the grand, sweeping chorus of the waters within and without you. Be with your pain, feel it, and let it move.

How do you ‘let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.’ This seems like a difficult question in the age of dissociation, when it’s hard to even know if my body needs quietude, exercise, or more food? How do we seek the guidance of the soft animals all around us? If my body was a cat, it would stretch out on a breakfast nook when the sun cracks its shell, and spills yolky light. It would climb, scratch, perch, and catch mice. If my body was a raccoon, I would be a no-good punk, flipping over trash cans in the middle of the night, looking for leftover lasagna, or a greasy drumstick, to rock out and turn darkness into music. Maybe, the poem is saying I should embrace my inner cat and raccoon more often.

The nature of life is ephemeral: jobs change, friends move, family estranges, relationships fizzle. We build modern houses with steel beams and reinforced concrete, because we want to belong to something that lasts. To know one has a ‘place in the family of things’ is to walk outside and greet the magnolia tree outside your front door, and the migrating geese flying above your street, as next of kin, as neighbors answering you, over and over, in our mother tongue, the poetry of the imagination.

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