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.