Today, I got caught up in poetry. Specifically, Mary Oliver. How is it that I had not discovered her magic until recently?
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. |
Poetry like this is like a Van Gogh painting – it stops me in my tracks; makes me gasp with its beauty.
Art: I am happy to be contemplating beauty and not the ugliness that man creates every day. Humans also create beauty: music, books, poetry, paintings, sculpture – and more and more.
The Mother creates beauty we cannot even emulate. Yet I intent to try. I am enthralled by the idea of reclaiming a piece of land, observing what the Mother does, learning from her, being her handmaiden – assisting her to create a place of magic for all that grows and lives in a beautiful garden.
