Wild Geese

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.
© Mary Oliver.

with thanks to Natalie - I wish you your dreams.

Freedom and Destiny

Anyone able to regard his or her own life and existence as an integral whole within the context of the whole, like the physicists, psychologists, and poets mentioned above, anyone able, as they were, to accept the future as the present, is accepting his or her own destiny. And acceptance of one’s destiny means freedom. And this freedom, once gained, has a remarkable corollary: that our freedom to affirm our destiny can be transformed to a great extent into a freedom from our destiny. (And it should be evident that in this transformation the potentiality for shaping ourselves is not excluded, but underscored, and that full acceptance of our responsibilities is required.)

Jean Gebser, Psyche & Matter: the Validity of The Dualistic Hypothesis
Poet and philosopher