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, from Dream Work (1986)
"Wild Geese" is a poem I heard for the first time last summer. Over the Christmas break, I purchased a copy of her collection, Devotions. She is one of my current favorite poets. Reading her poetry, I found, is best read aloud. It is the ultimate grounding exercise -- something you can implement in your routine at the end of the day before you go to sleep. The diction almost feels like a prayer -- without the institutions of religion jading its authenticity.
My experience with God on an institutional level has certainly been associated with shame, and for my entire childhood prayer has not always been a ritual that grounds me. The poetry of Oliver has been a wonderful guide - literature that reminds me that I can implement radical self-forgiveness for my faults as I become wiser. Our concept of God does not need to be restricted to dogma. We need to make God for ourselves.
I admire that Oliver views her place of worship (her church) as Nature. Before I was introduced to her poetry, I knew the power that Nature had when I was amid my meditations. I would often go into the woods and use the clarity the wilderness brought to write my poetry.
The Christian dogma emphasizes the vitality of repentance in keeping one’s relationship with God stable; the believer repents after sinning in the mortal realm to maintain a devoted relationship with the Christian God in the heavenly realm. This process remains deeply rooted in God as a figure that dictates the ruling threshold of spiritual hierarchy rather than viewing Him as a force that influences all facets of humanity and nature. Oliver levels the human being as a presence within nature by rejecting that repentance represents a vital component of spiritual servitude to God and advocating for love as the only essential devotional practice.
A “God-fearing” person is an archetype that not only emphasizes the intense discipline religious guides enforce onto members of a religious and/or political institution but also enforces the belief of spiritual hierarchy in traditional belief systems about God. Before the contemporary exigence of Oliver’s poetry, “Divine rights” granted the ruling class justification for their oppression of the rest of humankind; this therefore made the lower classes believe that these higher classes remained closer to God than they ever could be. Their servitude to their oppressors thus conjured their image of God as a higher oppressor. Repentance was a process borne of fear and necessity.
When Oliver asserts the believers “do[es] not have to walk on [their] knees / for a hundred miles repenting,” she grants the individual the liberty to approach the Lord less frighteningly than initially enforced by institutions of the church and modern politics. To the poet’s self-concept of devotional practice, the believer should feel free to relish in the splendors of nature — which she ceases to deem as products of God; in fact, the splendor of Him reveals itself in the vastness of the Earth’s landscapes, “moving across the landscapes, over the prairies and deep trees, the mountains and the rivers.” These lines evoke the astonishment of observing the natural world — a condition not jaded by the fear that hierarchical authorities inflict on individuals in the human-made thresholds below them. They alter the approach to faith as a way of living (something meditative) rather than a trial before dying.
To be a living being on Earth, according to Oliver, requires nothing except to exist “in the family of things.” She draws on the image of the “wild geese,” to create a picture of what it may mean for someone to return to themself, which is equivalent to returning home and returning to God. The migration patterns of the wild geese Oliver contemplates when she wrote this piece build on the feeling of awe she expresses in previous lines and reframes her focus from the planet’s landscape to the beings inhabiting it. When she observes the living, she spiritualizes the migration as “the world offer[ing] itself to [the imagination of the living].” The body of the Earth is connected to the living through this wonder: a holy matrimony rooted in absolute love and interconnectedness. This philosophy of love molds the foundation for wonder.
The space left after the believer abandons repentance must be filled with something so this emptiness does not compromise the connectivity of “the family of things.” God encourages the beings of the Earth to experience Him by “only [allowing] to let the soft animal of [their bodies] / love what it loves.” Love without consequence is the most Godly virtue. In this light, awe becomes tranquil when compared to its presentation from a hierarchical religious system. Love as devotion dissolves the barriers of spiritual hierarchy, and allows the believer to experience God as the fruit of living. “[D]espair” exists as a minor cycle of death in the vast portrait of what living in God’s family encompasses. The believer should simply exist, love, and never self-mutilate. That has never been heaven’s mission.
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