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.”
Mary Oliver, “Wild Geese”
A couple weekends ago, I tagged along with my friend Emily to a three-hour “restorative yoga” class. I guess the yoga studio offers it a couple times a year. Emily assured me that this was not three hours of intense yoga. She had to assure me this a bunch before I agreed to go, but she was telling the truth. You just get into these incredibly relaxing and easy poses and stay in each one for 10-15 minutes while the instructor plays ridiculously relaxing and amazing music and burns incense and occasionally reads beautiful poetry. It was an out-of-body experience. I’ve never done anything like it. The three hours went by in what felt like minutes. We all kept checking our cell phones after the class, like, “No way this is the right time.” It was like we’d been transported into a different universe for those three hours. Everything felt a little more magical in there.
Anyway, I emailed the instructor a couple days later to be like, “Um, I need a list of every single song that you played and also all of the poems you read.” I am so demanding. She was totally cool and sent me a list of everything I wanted, and this Mary Oliver poem is one I remember totally blowing my mind when she read it. I’m also obsessing on a piece of music called “Main Titles” from the soundtrack to Chocolat. I remember it just totally blowing my mind when she played this during class. So a big shout-out and thank you to Lisa at Yogalife for taking the time to indulge my every demand. I wish everyone could be as reasonable as you.
