“First be a good animal.”
It’s fall and no matter where I am in this wide, wide world - fall always brings memories of geese honking, flying south. Neil Young too, writing about the part of the world I’m from in his haunting Helpless …
There is a town in North Ontario
With dream, comfort, memory to spare
And in my mind, I still need a place to go
All my changes were there
Blue, blue windows behind the stars
Yellow moon on the rise
Big birds flying across the sky
Throwing shadows on our eyes
Leave us …. Helpless.
I sat down and produced the above video for a Mary Oliver poem I’ve always loved. Love it because it speaks to something essential but also because it always reminded me of my mother, how I looked at her in wonder as a young boy, flowers in her hair, loving all living things, hugging her goats, tending with such care her garden, kissing her dogs and saving the spiders in the back porch. A true saint, a re-incarnation of Saint Gertrude of Nivelles, a “true nature’s child” is my mom.
Wild Geese is a shot across the bow, it is a warning and reminder that we can’t remove ourselves from nature, our “family of things”. We can’t run away from ourselves, we are nature. It’s free, warm and there for us all, it is all we have.
Our material beliefs are just puffery and imaginative high-brow insanity, the thought that we don’t belong to nature nor the natural forces that inform everything and all.
The poem is essentially a religious one - replace God with nature and you have a message that there is purpose to things, you are loved and accepted in this world - despite humanity’s cruelty, the “fall” and our seeming seperation from the godhead.
I won’t belay the point. Just take in the poem. I improved the audio after hours of tweaking and did my best to choose the right imagery that would respect Oliver’s words and sentiments.
Look! Korea is here. Canada is there.
But the honking of the wild geese is forever.
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.
Also see Bill Lishman’s full, original documentary on YouTube.
Wild Geese