In my hunt for the perfect light for the large painting I’ve been doing I kept finding myself in the neighboring corn field at all hours of the day. One morning I went out before the sun crested over the trees in our little valley. After standing in the predawn light for a half an hour and finally realizing that the sun rose behind what I was trying to have lit and that it didn’t even reach that spot until…oh…let’s say noon… I headed back across the fields. Just then a flock of geese came flying up the field, the point of their v headed straight for me. When they saw me they turned, circled, and came back again. I was standing in their spot. They barked and honked at me as they passed over me multiple times and then finally decided to move on over the hills.
Wild Geese. 5x7 inches. Oil on paper.
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.