(First in a series about healing pneumonia and asthma.)
Last night, my friends Sharon and Ronen came over to visit. They brought chicken soup. Ronen read this poem.
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.
— Mary Oliver
I have pneumonia. “Pneumonia” from the Greek, pneuma, “soul, spirit, breath.” Perhaps akin to Latin, numina, “mystery, holy.” The strange and beautiful grief of the world has now made a nest in my lungs.
This poem opens the door in my chest into what my body has been feeling.
See the great-hewn door frame, set in its threshold, wide and high, mounted in mud brick walls. Smell the cedar. Smell the earth. See the rounded double doors, whose tops who remember being green and swaying in the sky. See the spiral door handles of meteoritic iron. Now see the doors open, and look through them — look into the whole night sky and out to the beach of stars.
Utterly let go of life or death or hope and utterly rest in the arms of the Mystery. Let go of seeking, and simply be in the body, simply say Yes, and within that vastness, moving across landscapes, feet on the ground and yet walking amid the stars, somehow head home.
Ronen and I agreed we could never hear the poem too many times.
I feel loved. I am grateful. I feel the love of my husband, family and friends, and the strange, wide, yet so intimate love of the Mystery.
“You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves . . .
“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.”
1 response so far ↓
1 Doris // Oct 30, 2009 at 11:22 am
More and more I love this poem so deeply, for all the reasons you articulate so eloquently, for myriad other reasons, for mysterious not yet known reasons as it resonates more and more in my bones, like a gong, like an expanding ripple in the saltwater ocean of this soupy world. No, you can never hear this poem too many times.
I’m so glad you are jumping up and into your life again, Baruch Hashem, as you heal every more powerfully.
much love,
D
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