WILD GEESE
As it has become an annual tradition, I would like to share a few of my favorite poems with you during the month of December. Every week, I will share a poem with my brief reflection below. I invite you to do the same from where and how you are today.
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’s Wild Geese is a classic. For me, today, the word “meanwhile” is being highlighted. Meanwhile captures something serendipitous, seemingly irrelevant, and something that can easily be ignored. When meanwhile becomes permanent enough to capture our imagination, we are at the doorway of God’s message. Meanwhile also allows us to take a deep breath and pause to notice what’s around or above us and lift up our eyes from our “repentance” and “despair.” Toward the end of the poem, Oliver lingers on the last “meanwhile” image of wild geese and imbues the very calling of our lives.
Like Oliver, I find that the pursuit of our calling can be both harsh and exciting. What it does do is “announce our place in the family of things” over and over again. I love the expansive nature and intimate familial language of our calling “in the family of things,” reminding us of the interconnectivity and interdependence in all things as God the author and perfector in all and of all. Anticipating and celebrating Advent this season at one level is about joining the wide and perennial family and tradition, reminding us of our place in the family and the history of things.
Lastly, Thomas Merton’s reflection is apt here.
"A tree gives glory to God by being a tree. For in being what God means it to be it is obeying [God]. It “consents,” so to speak, to [God's] creative love. It is expressing an idea which is in God and which is not distinct from the essence of God, and therefore a tree imitates God by being a tree."
I would like to surmise that our invitation is twofold: one is to be a “tree” or a “wild goose,” giving glory to God and consenting to God’s creative love. At the same time, we are not the end as we are called to merely hold our place in the cosmic family of things. I wonder if that is why it is harsh and exciting or exciting and harsh.