you do not have to be good.

8 months pregnant, walking in the desert, loving what i love

The cottonwood bosque hemming the Rio Grande is alive with geese and sandhill cranes.  Every day this week, the geese have been sunbathing in the alfalfa fields of the ranch next door, and Maizie “honks” every time she sees them.  In one of her favorite books, she loves an illustration of geese flying through the sky, and a wild lookin’ woman dancing in the maize colored grass below them.  Maizie makes a honking noise at the illustrated geese, but then she lovingly touches the dancing woman with this sort of wistful look on her face.  When she does this, I am reminded of a poem, “Wild Geese” by Mary Oliver, and I want Maizie Blue to know it.  It makes my soul ache.

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.

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