September 24: "Wild Geese," Family of Things, Teeming Life

Mary Oliver reminds us we are family . . . 

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.

Oliver says you don't have to be happy or grateful.  You don't have to crawl on your hands and knees for a hundred miles, begging for forgiveness.  You can be angry or floundering in despair.  You owe nothing in order to be a member of the family of things.

It's easy to feel isolated or alone in the modern world.  Despite all of the social media platforms, human beings are more estranged from each other than ever before.  Rather than drawing the citizens of the planet closer together, Facebook and Instagram and X/Twitter/Whatever seem to be driving us further apart.  Just today, I snoozed four people in my Facebook feed because of their mean-spirited posts.

Yet, we really are all one family.  It's just that some of our brothers and sisters thrive on what separates us versus what we have in common.  And a lot of humans also don't get how much our survival depends on trees and animals and birds and fish and all teeming life.  Everything is connected and important, despite what climate-change deniers and oil companies and auto executives say.  

There's a reason why, at the height of the pandemic, when everything was shut down and everyone was staying home, suddenly the people of India could clearly see the Himalayas for the first time in decades.  Nobody was driving cars, and air pollution plummeted.  It took a global epidemic to provide tangible evidence how much harm humans are inflicting on the world.

Every night, I send these little blog love letters out into the world.  I don't intend to piss people off or stir any kind of political pot.  My goal is pretty simple--to make people laugh, think, be kind, and, above all else, love one another.  We all have more in common with each other than we have differences.  The sooner we realize this fact, the better the world will be.

This planet, and everything on it, is a gift and a blessing.  From the clouds above us to the ants beneath our feet, we need to start treating it all as something miraculous and wonderful.  Even wild geese, with their harsh and exciting cries, are our brothers and sisters.  That's what Oliver says.

If a kangaroo sneezes in Australia, Saint Marty will say gesundheit in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.

April 6: Funny Girl, Elizabeth Gilbert, "Eat, Pray, Love," New Cartoon

She was a funny girl, old Jane.  I wouldn't exactly describe her as strictly beautiful.  She knocked me out, though.  She was sort of muckle-mouthed.  I mean when she was talking and she got excited about something, her mouth sort of went in about fifty different directions, her lips and all.  That killed me.  And she never really closed it all the way, her mouth.  It was always just a little bit open, especially when she got in her golf stance, or when she was reading a book.  She was always reading, and she read very good books.  She read a lot of poetry and all.  She was the only one, outside my family, that I ever showed Allie's baseball mitt to, with all the poems written on it.  She'd never met Allie or anything, because that was her first summer in Maine--before that, she went to Cape Cod--but I told her quite a lot about him.  She was interested in that kind of stuff.

Holden and Jane are the only two characters in The Catcher in the Rye who are identified as readers of really good books.  Holden reads books by authors like Isak Dinesen and his brother, D.B.; Jane reads poetry.  Holden has certain ideas about what makes good literature.  As I've said earlier, the mark or a good writer is that, "when you're done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it."

A few years ago, everybody was reading a book by Elizabeth Gilbert.  Oprah did a show on it.  Julia Roberts starred in the film adaptation of it.  It was one of the best-loved and most-hated books of the time.  Even now, when this book is mentioned in conversation by "literary" folks, it's usually in pejorative terms.  For some reason, Elizabeth Gilbert's book has become the stereotype of the self-absorbed memoir.  Gilbert is a spoiled, privileged whiner, according to popular opinion.

Of course, the book is Eat, Pray, Love, and I'm writing this post to reclaim it.  I read it when it was first released, and I loved it.  The writing is vibrant and funny.  Gilbert's story is transformative and wise.  I think the reason the book got such a bad rap is that Gilbert seems to have such good luck.  I mean, she gives up the American dream--husband, home in the country, great career--and spends a year living in Italy, India, and Bali.  She eats a lot of good food, prays and meditates, and falls in love.  Basically, it's a book about blessings.

Putting all that aside, Elizabeth Gilbert is a hell of a writer.  Here is her description of eating the "best pizza in the world" in Naples:

...They have only two varieties of pizza here--regular and extra cheese.  None of this new age southern California olives-and-sun-dried-tomato wannabe pizza twaddle.  The dough, it takes me half my meal to figure out, tastes more like Indian nan than like any pizza dough I ever tried.  It's soft and chewy and yielding, but incredibly thin.  I always thought we only had two choices in our lives when it came to pizza crust--thin and crispy, or thick and doughy.  How was I to have known there could be a crust in this world that was thin and doughy?  Holy of holies!  Thin, doughy, strong, gummy, yummy, chewy, salty pizza paradise...

Gilbert turns everything into a spiritual experience--food, prayer, and love.  If you haven't read Eat, Pray, Love yet, if you've avoided it because of all the negative hype, you need to give it a chance.  If you've read it before and fell into the trap of popular Gilbert hatred, tear the cover off the book and imagine you're reading something by an up-and-coming essayist.  You won't be disappointed.

Elizabeth Gilbert passes the Holden Caulfield author test.  She makes Saint Marty want to abandon his life and travel.  Maybe he'll go to Green Bay next weekend.

Confessions of Saint Marty