A poem from an old quote journal for Monday.
While the Puritan in me raises an eye at the lines about allowing our body to love what it loves, ("There must be restraint! Boundaries! Decency! " she murmurs beneath her bonnet "What if someone reads this and then tries to marry their cow? That's going to be on you, you know." She sadly shakes her covered head at my careless destruction of civilization) the rest of me knows that I have needed permission to love the simplest of things - or to admit that I do at least.
And so, as I share this poem that could be used to justify any number of bad decisions, I wish to remind you that "Allowing yourself to love something" is not the same as "Laying claim to something you love."
WILD GEESE
Mary Oliver
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.
In her own words:
