“Meanwhile……” Mary Oliver, Wild Geese and regaining perspective

Early yesterday morning, as we went for a walk in the park, we overheard the shouted conversation between several skeins of geese heading north. There's something irresistible about that gaggled running commentary between around a hundred geese as they pass the time of day during a journey of several thousand miles. For me they speak of Spring, of life on the move, of rhythms easily lost in a life too constrained by demands, expectations and stuff that is more urgent than important.

Geese have always given me a sense of perspective – ever since I saw, year on year, hundreds and hundreds of them stopping off on the fields around the farms in Ayrshire where I was brought up. The way they hold their head absolutely steady as their whole body pulsates with energy. The unerring instinct for the right direction. The rota system of leadership at the point of the chevron. And the sound of their honking, the excited noise of those who know they're going home, wherever that is.

Mary Oliver, (the photo must have been taken during the stereoscopic windscreen years for glasses), as so often, pulls threads of meaning from such natural happenstance and weaves them into images of how we'd like our lives to be. She makes you think about it: despite all our self-absorbed preoccupations, the world goes on. Three times in this poem, like a reprimand for our self-centred worldview, the word "meanwhile". The sentiment not unlike Jesus advice to look at the birds of the air – he probably didn't mean geese, but the point is the same. And whatever else geese do – they do make me look up and out, instead of down and in. They remind me that however important my own life seems at any given moment….meanwhile….the world goes on.

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.