Mary Oliver’s poem, Wild Geese, offers us a path forward as we consider reconnecting to the natural world.

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.

For me, her message is that we do not have to take on large, insurmountable tasks to save the Earth. We only have to open our hearts and our minds to the beauty, wonder, and awe of the natural world. “You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.” The living and nonliving wonders of Earth are available for us to love and appreciate. From our love will come the answers for how to experience the wonder without destroying it.

For no matter how we experience Earth’s wonders, she will go on in her own way, oblivious to our demands. “Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain are moving across the landscapes.” And again, “meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air, are heading home again.”

We see our selves as the dominant member of the hierarchy of living things on Earth. But are we? If we continue to insert our dominance and control, we might lose our imagination as only one of Earth’s wonders.

I think Mary Oliver is asking us to open our eyes to these wonders, the wild geese, and become a member of the “family of things.” The task is not a simple one because we will be called to reconcile thousands of years of control and domination. I, for one, believe that unless we accept the challenge future generations are at risk. The wild geese may no longer have a home to fly to.