Monday, May 16, 2016

You Do Not Have to be Good

Day 5 of 30-day writing challenge: a quote I try to live by.


“You do not have to be good.”

This is the first line from Mary Oliver’s Wild Geese poem. The whole poem is so freaking fabulous in the unpretentious way it conveys so much meaning in the simplest way possible.

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.

I have a copy of this poem above my sink so I can read it while I fill the coffee pot with water in the morning and I have it written on a lampshade in my living room, so I can glimpse words of it when I pass by.

I like poetry because I can carry it with me. I can memorize a few lines and pull them out when I need them. If I’m bummed because I burned supper, I tell myself: You do not have to be good. I yell at my kids for no reason: You do not have to be good. I find myself being stingy and selfish: You do not have to be good. Lazy and useless: You do not have to be good. Those words do so much for me. They take the pressure off perfection and guilt. Guilt is such a useless emotion and perfection is such a boring goal. You do not have to be good. You don’t even want to, do you? Why are you trying so hard to be good?

So, what do you have to do? Oliver answers that for us in the fourth and fifth lines: “You only have to let the soft animal of your body/love what it loves.” Wow! No matter how hard I try I can’t ever, ever be good. Not for more than a couple of minutes, anyway. Then I’m right back to my usual bad self. I can let the soft animal of my body love what it loves, though. The soft animal of my body can love what it loves all day long.

There’s so much more meat in the poem, I love the pace that the poem reveals itself, unfurling like a line of wild geese flying across the sky. I love the way the words feel in my mouth. I can taste this poem.

Let’s all stop trying so freaking hard to be good, and let’s love what we love instead. Funny as it is, but so much good can come from that love.

2 comments:

  1. I LOVE this poem~ it's alluded to in my latest manuscript project!

    ReplyDelete
  2. I LOVE this poem~ it's alluded to in my latest manuscript project!

    ReplyDelete