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.

- Mary Oliver

(extract from Catherine Ingram's book Passionate Presence)

She had been on the quest for so long that the reasons for it were no longer clear to her. She was just moving, step after step, too tired to think. Having recently fallen down a slippery bank into a thicket, she was bruised and scratched, her daring leaps of former times now too difficult to execute.

Seeing a river in the distance, she made her way there to get a drink and wash her wounds. Afterwards, she lay under a nearby tree thinking that if she could just get some rest, she would be able to renew her journey with invigorated determination. After all, the quest was important. The quest was all there was.

She was about to drift off to sleep when she noticed an old woman sitting on the riverbank nearby. The woman, who had been gazing at the water, turned and silently gestured to her, opening her arms with palms outwards as if to say. "Just this."

Yes, just this, the woman thought, as she fell into a deep sleep.

When she awoke several hours later, evening had fallen and the old woman had gone. Getting up, she realized that something was very different. The stars were now shining pinpoints within her being, their light no longer traveling from a distance but encompassed by her awareness as glowing prisms within the vast regions of herself. The river and its sound, the trees and their smell-all now existed in a sweeping whole. a multidimensional canvas of color, forms and sensations. She realized in a flash that it had always been so.

Her restless thoughts, so long her only companions, disappeared into the void as soon as they arose, as though pulled into space. They were whispers in a cathedral. They were ghosts without relavence. She remembered that she had been on a quest, but now the idea of it seemed strange, and she could no longer hold the thought of its importance.

The silence, on the other hand, seemed almost loud in contrast. She spent the rest of the night feeling like a bird that had been freed from a cage into a palace of starlight, the silence now and again punctuated by words "just this" though even the words were claimed by it.

Don't surrender your loneliness
so quickly~
Let it cut more deeply~

Let it ferment and season you
as few human
or even divine ingredients can.

Something missing in my heart tonight~
makes my eyes so soft... My voice~
So tender...