I always keep coming back to this poem; I guess it really is famous for a reason. So many people can relate to the themes or see themselves reflected in the pictures she paints with her words. For me, I grew in a household with a lot of religious guilt that, over the last two decades, I really had to unlearn. Unlearn the shame piled on me.
Feels like as millennials, we grew up with this fear-based Christian faith that somehow loved talking about hell!
Also, I love her light, airy way of writing.
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
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