Pages

Thursday, August 26, 2010

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.


A heartfelt thanks to my friend Terri at Windlost for introducing me to Mary Oliver.  Love this!

Friday, August 13, 2010

The Summer Day

My amazing friend sent me this poem, said she thought of me when she read it.  I think it is perfection.


The Summer Day

Mary Oliver

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean-
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

from New and Selected Poems, 1992
Beacon Press, Boston, MA

Friday, August 06, 2010

Adventures in Food

Scotland...  Today my friend and I got soaked to the bone walking through a 17th century graveyard in Glasgow.  We worked up enough of an appetite to get a little more adventurous with the pub food... yup... haggis and lamb meat pie.

Thinking that I'm more of a Mediterrean traveling kinda girl.

Tomorrow we are on to Inverness (northern Highlights) and in search of Nessie.