In honour of a lovely, rare Snow Goose sighted amongst hundreds and hundreds of wild Canada Geese in a muddy, agricultural field in Alexandra, PEI, I offer you the rare and lovely Mary Oliver's poem 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 about 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
May the loveliness of the natural world startle you awake from your dreaming.
(This morning I was literally startled awake from dreaming by the distress call of a Black-capped Chickadee.)
Jill
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