Wild Geese? Not so much...

This morning for the National Writing Project ISI invitation to write, AP English teacher, Stacey, shared Mary Oliver's, Wild Geese.It surprisingly threw some people off. Invite to write can sometimes do that when you haven't learned to let your guard down and realize there are no outside expectations from the facilitators or participants, except to write. Something. Put pen (or pencil) to paper and write. For me, my journaling strayed quite a ways from Oliver's poem. Experience with NWP, meant I had no qualms with taking any nugget I could mine out of the presentation. No worries, no expectations. No concern that I might appear to be threatened by poetry, or that my peers would assume six years in elementary school meant I couldn't explicate a poem beyond Silverstein or Nesbitt. I just heard what I heard and was inspired the way I was inspired. I don't choose how it comes to me. I just choose to embrace it. I worked on it some more when I got home, I might revisit it again sometime. If you know Oliver's poem, you'll recognize the found nuggets, or borrowed phrases and ideas. Here it is...

I'm reminded of Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement. The holiest day of the year for the Jewish people. The idea of repenting, of searching for something, of pledging internally, and before G-d, to do better next year, next month, next week, tomorrow, today.

In a life where few others around me share my beliefs, it feels like people are just going on with their everyday (because they are), as I sit in silent meditation, pondering over what can be better next year, how I can be better next year.

All of this while the wild geese are heading home again.

Perhaps we are the geese. Jewish people, heading home again to our house of worship, to our people, for the yearly renewal of our covenant with G-d.

Just imagine, as we wash ourselves in the saline of our tears, we cleanse ourselves of the past year's transgressions and humbly ask forgiveness, the world offers itself to our imagination. G-d calls to us to imagine how to do better, be better, live better.

We ask forgiveness of each other, we pray to The Heavens over and over, announcing to Adonai that we understand our place in the family of things.

Poem: "Wild Geese," by Mary Oliver from New & Selected Poems (Harcourt Brace).

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.