For over a decade, I have lived the seasons alongside the wild geese; always aware of their powerful presence, preening in the ponds, resting in the fields or flying overhead during walks in the woods. I have heard their honking on winter nights through tightly shut doors and windows as a skein fly high up in the dark skies. The call of the geese pulls me out from my mundane existence. I return back momentarily with a wider perception of life, reminded again of the tiny place of humans in this vast and grand cosmos. In the poem Wild Geese, by Mary Oliver, the call of the geese is a call of belonging.
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.