Homing Instinct
Saturday, November 7, 2009 at 12:01AM These flying geese marked the end of our gratitude ceremony last Sunday.
I looked at these geese with longing. All of them together. Finding their place in the group, singing and calling to keep everyone close. All knowing by instinct the way home.
In some ways we are like these geese — traveling in a direction but not yet landed.
I am reminded of one of my favorite Mary Oliver poems, "Wild Geese."
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.
We are moving today. And I am feeling a bit umoored by our move.
We do have a landing spot for the next 10 months. A really lovely place to call home, actually.
But we are not yet certain where our final destination will be. (Stay in Wisconsin? Or be like these geese and venture farther south?)
I want the certainty of these geese, that sense of inner compass.
Yet I know that we find the destination by being on the journey.
For now, it is enough that we are taking flight into our future.
In our new backyard, we have a water channel that leads to a lake. We saw a school of geese swimming by the other day and the droppings on the pier to show that they sometimes stop on land.
I hoping the geese will be around for a while after we move in.
They will serve as a reminder to trust my instincts and know that we will indeed "find our place in the family of things."
Today, I fly away from this nest we've been in for seven years.
But I will watch for the geese as I await the calling to take flight again and head home.
Reader Comments (1)
I wonder if the geese know exactly where they will land, or just keep flying until the feeling to land is just right.