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.