Mary Oliver, New and Selected Poems (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992), 110.
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.
3 comments:
The goodness we impose on ourselves is sometimes not God’s goodness but just an idea, a preconception that separates us from the surprising forms in which grace can sneak up on us.
Loving God, please help me let go of the oppressive goodness that I am trying to impose and help me receive the true, sometimes strange goodness that comes from your love.
I pray to remember that we are all connected - in love and in the surprising and ordinary beauty of this world.
Merry Advent, a time when I feel grateful for you both, Lindsay & Alba, for your place in the family of things. To all Lectio Divina readers: blessings of this holy season as wild geese head home again.
Post a Comment