Learning to Fly–At the West End Gallery
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 your despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.o
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, Wild Geese
Listening to a flock of Canadian geese fly over last week as they headed south brought this poem from the late Mary Oliver to mind. The honks and squawks of the flock were, indeed, harsh and exciting, as though they were giddy with delight at the prospect of being homeward bound.
It sometimes sounds to me as though they are calling out for everybody and everything to join their ranks, to grab a spot at the end of one of the legs of their long vee in the sky. To share their joy and excitement as they make their way home.
I sure wished that I could fly at that moment. If I could I ‘d have been up there trying to honk out a giddy initiation for others to join along and take their place, as Oliver writes, in the family of things.
To go home once more.
I am on my way this morning to Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in NYC for a consultation there. I’m going to try to keep those geese in mind today.
Maybe one day, I’ll learn to fly up there in the sky with them…
Here’s a song that I’ve shared here a number of times, I’ll Fly Away. It was written over three years between 1929 and 1932 by Albert E. Brumley, who is credited with writing over 600 gospel songs. This song has been recorded by innumerable artists and is considered one of the most recorded gospel songs of all time. Being a fan of both artists here, I am kind of partial to the Gillian Welch/ Allson Krauss version from O Brother, Where Art Thou?
Redtree Times 