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.
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I got up ridiculously early on Monday to help Paul move everything left in our house out for AmVets to pick up, only to find out hours later that they didn't bring a big enough truck for all our things and to have to go haul a bunch of it back inside. Then I met my friend Ellen at the Brooklyn Deli for a brunch that turned into lunch, since we had months of events to catch up on. I met her in a baby group for our older children, so nearly three decades ago. I brought Paul a bagel from the deli and did some computer stuff while he worked in the Airbnb with our cats who are still out of sorts.
Late in the afternoon, we went to take the end table we've decided to keep to Manassas to be shipped with the rest of our things. From there we went to drop off our cable box and router at a Verizon store, first in Manassas where we were originally told to take it, then at Fair Oaks Mall where the other store directed us. It was fine because we needed to end up at Tysons II to meet my friend Shalini for dinner at Lebanese Taverna. Now we're watching Pride and Prejudice because the DVD is in the library here and we can't get the cable to work. From Sunday when we stopped at Washingtonian to see the goslings:
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