Finding a Voice

Today was one of those windy prairie days that strips the coloured leaves off the trees and piles them up in the yard.

Today after supper, through the kitchen open window, I heard the geese honking in the crisp, cool air, heading south again.

Today was a day of creativity with my friend Andria, here for retreat and creative reorientation. We rested, we talked, we sang, she painted and sketched and carved, I played guitar and piano, we cleaned some spaces. I had a songwriting date with Lisa C. on Skype and we finished a song for the OptionS Pregnancy Centre fundraising banquet (November 6). I learned some new things about technology: Andria and I recorded a demo of it using my digital recorder, I downloaded Audacity, edited it, and learned how to post it to my website. It was a good day for artistic accomplishment.

(I’ll post a link for the song later, when it’s more than a demo.)

I am listening to a lecture from iTunes U: Contemplation and Action in the Writing Life, given by Jessie Van Eerden at Seattle Pacific University. She opened with a Mary Oliver poem that summed up the feeling of this day.

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 landscapes,

over the prairies and the deep trees,

the mountains and the rivers.

Meanwhile the wild gees, 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.

-Mary Oliver