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.

Questions:

1. How do you understand the first line of this poem: You do not have to be good?
2. What did “being good” entail for you as a child, as a teenager as a young adult, and what does “being good” mean to you now?
3. What are the ways in which “the soft animal of your body” communicates itself to you that it might, as the poem suggests, be responding with love and appreciation to your experience of life?
4. How does this happen on a daily basis for you? What do you think gets in the way of it happening?
5. Are there ways in which you can connect with this more for yourself? Or is it a kind of a gift when it happens? A kind of grace? (As in: an unmerited form of favour, or peace bestowed on the mind. Do we get to feel this way by “the grace of God“ (or Life) rather than anything we ourselves do? Or can we cultivate more of this “soft animal pleasure” in our lives.
6. The word “despair” is such a strong word. In what way does it capture your mind’s response to something going on in your life at the moment?
7. Does it help, when we are thinking of our despair, to have a “meanwhile the world goes on” going on at the same time in our minds?
8. Does the “meanwhile” of the rain and the landscapes and the trees and the mountains and the rivers, offer you a kind of solace as I think Mary Oliver intended? Does it help you to think about other things that are occurring unrelated to you at the same time as your despairing?
9. What do you think she means here when she says that “the world offers itself to your imagination“? In what way in your life at the moment, do you feel that the world is still offering itself to your imagination?
10. What is our imagination supposed to do with the world? How would you like your imagination to continue interacting with the world.
11. What for you does the “family of things“ point to? Do you feel yourself part of that “family“ – in what way?
12. Is this necessarily a family of “things“ or a family of shared experience?
13. What are the shared experiences that make us feel familiar to each other, that make us feel like we are family? You and me, but maybe also our experience with that of the world, and others?
14. If you had to choose a couple of lines from this poem to repeat over and over again as you move through the day as a kind of mantra? What would those lines be? What do they mean to you now, and what might they mean to you after repeating them 100 times?