Welcome back, and "Wild Geese"
Gathering is back with a full week of poetry, starting with Wild Geese by Mary Oliver.
Welcome back lovely gatherers. Thank you for your patience during our hiatus! It was a much needed break where I was able to travel and enjoy the sun and free myself from a few obligations. But I am happy to be back, I’m excited to dive back into poetry, into words and metaphor, and to share this space with you all once again.
To make up for lost time, gathering will have a full week of poetry—that means poems every single day over the next week. I have chosen one of my favorite poems to start us off this week; please enjoy “Wild Geese” by Mary Oliver.
Wild Geese
by 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.
I confess (as I often do in these letters). I confess that I have been putting off gathering again for a while. I’ve felt anxious about writing, about putting words to the page and telling you all about poets and poems and poetry. I have been extremely anxious that what I am doing here will cease to exist, cease to matter, erode into nothing and become an artifact of my life, like this never happened and never mattered. I feared I had said all that I could say, that I had no more nice or useful words to share with you all.
Objectively, this is all silly. And common. Frankly, it’s expected. But I felt sad and overwhelmed, and just stewed in guilt and anxiety over whether or not gathering would return. And then I turned, as I often do, back to poetry. As Oliver says in the first lines of this poem: “You do not have to be good. / You do not have to walk on your knees / for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.” There is so much to unpack in these two lines. Whenever I read this, I tend to translate it to something along the lines of: everything I am and everything I do does not have to be perfect; I don’t have to feel guilty about everything I’m not. How does Oliver do it? How does she pack such an emotional punch in so few words?
Mary Oliver’s poetry has always been so honest and raw in its construction. Right from the beginning of this poem, Oliver addresses the reader. She is talking to you, reader. A line as cliché as “You do not have to be good” feels brand new coming from Oliver’s pen. Its position next to the imagery of crawling through the hot, abrasive desert for hundreds of miles, repenting, wishing you were something you’re not cuts straight to the heart of the reader.
Oliver strips down these grand ideas of guilt and shame, or striving and failing, to the heart of the matter. We (you and I, readers) are animals, in soft flesh, navigating this world we’ve constructed over hundreds of thousands of years. We evolved from the natural world, this planet of rocks and grass, water and deserts. As opposed to focusing on human influence over the world and human nature in this poem (the technology we’re addicted to and the buildings we’ve constructed), she turns to the natural world, which has always been here. Sun and rain pass over every plain, every forest, mountain, and river—they will continue to do that after we are long gone. No matter what we are doing and what we are feeling, the “wild geese, high in the clean blue air / are heading home again.”
Everything in this world is running on instinct, running through their patterns, and going where they may. Why do we fight so hard against our feelings? Why don’t we commend and wonder at our joys and hates and loves the same we commend the natural world its wind and its waves and its sun sets/rises?
At the end of the day, according to Mary Oliver, we as humans are part of the “family of things.” We are part of this world and the world is a part of us. So why are we working so hard to punish ourselves? to feel inadequate?
I come back to this poem whenever I am in my head too much, whenever I am feeling disconnected and unexceptional. This poem grounds me in the natural world and the soft animal of my body, and reminds me to just be. Reminds me that if this newsletter becomes a journal that I publish to the void, something that only my eyes see, that this still brings me joy, that I love doing this, that I love to gather.
I hope you enjoy gathering this week with me, reader. It’s nice to be back.
If you enjoyed this poem… you can listen to Mary Oliver read this poem. You can also read more of her poetry here.
If you are looking for a good summer read… I most recently finished Someone Who Will Love You in All Your Damaged Glory: Stories by Raphael Bob-Waksberg. These stories are funny, heartbreaking, and compelling. I highly recommend the audio book.
If you want to try writing poetry… all I can offer you today is the courage to put pen to paper and do the best you can.