Conversations with Mary Oliver: Wild Geese

Today I'm sharing another conversation with a poem by Mary Oliver; once again, her words are in italics, and the rest are mine. I wrote this piece back in March, in response to "Wild Geese" (the full text of which can be found here), and this tumblr post.

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.

I like to think of myself as a relatively laid-back person. This is, probably, not quite correct.

I have a strong tendency toward perfectionism. Whether that is innate or the result of religious trauma, I will never know—my best guess is that it's a both/and situation. It's easy for me to get caught up in all-or-nothing thinking and be paralyzed by the anxiety of wanting to do something the "right" way. Years of therapy and hard work have helped me to learn how to navigate this, to question those impulses.

Mary Oliver has helped, too.

Someone on a Discord server I'm part of shared a tumblr post the other day that was...illuminating. The author of the post pointed out that their Catholic upbringing actually ended up encouraging their suicidal ideation and self-harming behaviors. Why is this? In the author's words:

"from the time you're born and your parents take you to church to sit in the pew and eat gushers and scribble on the worship aid in your little LL Bean dresses and tights, you're told over and over again that to love is to die for something. or someone. to love is to have nails driven through your wrists. and ankles. to be holy is to starve and hallucinate and deny yourself medical attention, to suffer like a saint. to die like a martyr. to die, always to die."

They go on to explain that to a depressed teenager, this translated to a desire for suffering, because suffering felt...holy.

I know I had drawn some loosely similar conclusions in the past, but I'd never seen them articulated so clearly. I, too, was a depressed teenager, once—not Catholic, but evangelical—and I remember wanting, desperately wanting, the chance to prove my love for my friends by putting myself in harm's way. And then not knowing what to do with those feelings when I realized that, extended logically, this also meant putting my friends in harm's way.

To this day, I still have moments where my mind will wander in that direction, playing out vivid daydreams of me being the hero/martyr. These days, it's easier to separate myself from these thoughts—this isn't really what I want. It's just what I grew up believing I was supposed to want.

The first time I read "Wild Geese," the opening lines stopped me in my tracks and took my breath away. It may have been the first time that the idea that I wasn't fundamentally broken actually started to sink into my being.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.

Letting myself love what I love has been a journey, too.

I have always loved deeply, intensely. And that...scares people, sometimes. I don't really believe in relationship hierarchy, or in transactional relationships where everyone constantly keeps track of what they "owe" each other. Particularly in a society where we're constantly fed the message that you should have exactly one person in your life that satisfies all of your relationship needs, and that anyone else is somehow less important than that one person, this can come across as deeply weird. Some people find it unsettling, because it exists so far outside of the models of relationships that they're used to.

Lately, though, I've found myself landing in more and more places and among more and more people where counter-cultural relationships dynamics are the default, and I love that.

I think of Mary's words often.

The soft animal of my body loves the people in my life, loves hugging my loved ones close, loves cuddling with my husband and my dog and sometimes my friends.

I've recently discovered a newfound tenderness toward the soft animal of my body. My body and I have been at odds quite frequently throughout my life: I struggled deeply with body image throughout my entire adolescence and most of my 20s; in my early adulthood I dealt with a substantial amount of chronic pain; even in my early 30s I wrestled with some chronic health diagnoses that made feeling affectionate toward my body a challenge. I used to think I needed to make myself as physically small as possible, because I was convinced I was too much.

I've been working on reframing this relationship with my body, though. I'm learning to believe my loved ones when they tell me I'm not too much, that I do deserve to take up as much space as I need. And while I still sometimes feel at odds with my body, I'm also much better able to treat it as a "soft animal," something that inherently deserves care and tenderness.

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.

There's a lot to despair about these days. When I sit with my spiritual companionship clients, it's a frequent theme. It comes up a lot among my friends, and among people I do tarot readings for. I'm not immune to it, either—there is so much that is so bad right now.

And...

Meanwhile the world goes on.

The Earth keeps spinning. Climate change is terrifying and weather patterns look very different than they did even ten years ago, but there's still something about those cycles that can ground us, remind us that "the world" is more than our often small-minded human concerns. Human concerns are important. And in the grand scheme of things, they're also not. Both of these things can be true at the same time.

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.

It feels crucially important, in these often dark and despairing and lonely days, to remember that we belong. I am finding myself leaning more and more into my community, into relationships, into what the "soft animal of my body" loves. And that is reminding me, over and over, that I do have a place "in the family of things." We all do. Everything does. Maybe if we each started taking that to heart, the world would be an ever-so-slightly gentler place.