weasels and geese 2: geese

Another lovely sharing from Team Leaders Circle (TLC) retreat.

I went to TLC last fall and went again this fall.  Both years, we have been greeted with special poems (and candy!) on our beds.  

This year there was a lovely poem by Mary Oliver, from her book Dream Work, called "Wild Geese."  

It reads:

You do not have to do 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, 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.

Like the weasel story, this poem reminds us humans that we are animal.  If only we could remember that more often.  Listen to your body.  If only we didn't have to forget and remember to listen to our bodies and to follow our "single necessity."  

"You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves."  

And again, back around to calling.  "...the world...calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting - over and over announcing your place in the family of things."  

We belong - we are a part of "the family of things."  

And I love the "harsh and exciting" call of the geese.  In recent years, I've learned of the Celtic representation of the Holy Spirit as Wild Goose.  

I find this a particularly lovely representation of the Holy Spirit.  A bit more concrete and less mysterious than wind or fire, but just as wild and unpredictable.  I like the honking, obnoxious nature of the goose too.  And goose poo? Gross.  But part of the way of things.  We all poop.  We are interconnected with the world.  

I had an encounter with geese last summer when I visited with my friends in Knoxville.  We went camping and floated the river - the Tennessee maybe?  I had never done this before.  We all had tubes and floated our way down a small piece of the river, careful to raise our rear ends over rocks, and bounce our feet off of rocky areas, avoiding getting stuck.  For a portion of river, I was "by myself" - apart from the rest of our group, but amid other river-goers.  And suddenly, a single line of geese flew really low and close to us overhead, in the opposite direction as we were floating.  It was breathtaking.  Later, another line of geese came swimming upstream in another single line.  

After that encounter, I found myself enraptured with geese.  I have an image of a V of geese, cut from an old calendar, in my room now.  Before, this was an image that seemed bland to me - just another nature image, with bland colors and bland content.  Now it's captivating.  Who are these geese?  

I am absolutely certain that an even closer encounter with a goose would leave me terrified and/or grossed out.  Similar to my fascination with chickens, one day having a coop of them, and my recent opportunity to "help" kill one (with the same friends from the river trip) - but terror at the thought of holding one - they have talons, beaks, wings - what about that could possibly make for safe holding? 

This is partly what gives the goose its allure and mystery for me too.  They are wild creatures.  They could do something crazy at any moment.  And they gracefully coordinate into beautiful formations when they fly.  How does the goose know to do these things?  It "let[s] the soft animal of [its] body love what it loves."

Another poem about "Wild Geese," by Wendell Berry from Collected Poems 1957-1982

Horseback on Sunday morning,

harvest over, we taste persimmon
and wild grape, sharp sweet
of summer's end. In time's maze
over fall fields, we name names
that went west from here, names
that rest on graves. We open
a persimmon seed to find the tree
that stands in promise,
pale, in the seed's marrow.
Geese appear high over us,
pass, and the sky closes. Abandon,
as in love or sleep, holds
them to their way, clear,
in the ancient faith: what we need
is here. And we pray, not
for new earth or heaven, but to be
quiet in heart, and in eye
clear. What we need is here.

Wendell uses the word "abandon" here.  Similar to Annie's (previous post - on "weasels") mention of the weasel's "single necessity," "abandon" is what calls the goose to its post in the V or single line formation, to its squawking, flapping.  It is wild.  Just as the weasel is wild.  

I like that Wendell calls this "the ancient faith" - to follow our calling with total abandon, and to remember that "what we need is here."  "We pray, not for new earth or heaven, but to be quiet in heart, and in eye clear. What we need is here."  The ancient faith doesn't call for escape, but for quiet, to tap back into what is already here, if we can be still enough and tap deep enough.

All lovely nuggets.  I'm glad to have been invited into deep listening at Team Leaders Circle.  

weasels and geese 1: weasels

Oh dear, there's so much pondering, musing, and experiencing that's been happening the past months as I/we've been living L'Arche Atlanta!  Was just looking back at my last post - so much more musing since then around the same topic!

For now - I've been reflecting more on calling/lifestyle/life's work.  This has been stirring partly because of a L'Arche Team Leaders Circle Retreat that I went on, so I'll keep it here on this blog about my "life with folks with disabilities".  That, and because this is really my "current" blog.  Of course, none of my life is really "life without folks with disabilities" - so it all counts, I suppose.

The week started with an actual Retreat day (it's actually a week of Formation/Training, but in a retreat setting).  And we started the day hearing a story read aloud to us (love!).  Sarah Thomson read us "Living Like Weasels" by Annie Dillard, author of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.  I'm not sure if this story/essay/entry is in Tinker Creek, but it's by Annie.  

It starts out with lots of gory details about weasels killing other animals, one even trying to kill an eagle.  And I thought "what the hell? Why is she telling us these things?"  I do love a good gory animal story about animals being animals (for example: Mary Rose O'Reilly's graphic description of castrating rams on a commercial sheep farm in Barn at the End of the World).  However, I was a little put-off and puzzled at first with this sharing on our Retreat Day.  

By the end of the story, I got the picture.  Annie applies her first-hand encounter, learnings and musings about weasels - to vocation.  

She invites us to "live like weasels" - to get in touch with our animal selves, to follow our innermost necessity and desire.  

She describes weasels as "obedient to instinct" - they go for the jugular or base of the skull, because that's what they do.  They don't overthink, consider where in the larger picture of the food chain they exist.  They go for the jugular - period.  

She suggests that we could live like a weasel - we could, any one of us, choose to "go wild."  

I love this: "The thing is to stalk your calling in a certain skilled and supple way, to locate the most tender and live spot and plug into that pulse. This is yielding, not fighting. A weasel doesn't 'attack' anything; a weasel lives as he's meant to, yielding at every moment to the perfect freedom of single necessity."

To stalk your calling.  To yield.  Single necessity.  

"...to grasp your one necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you...Seize it and let it seize you up aloft even, till your eyes burn out and drop; let your musky flesh fall off in shreds, and let your very bones unhinge and scatter, loosened over fields, over fields and woods, lightly, thoughtless, from any height at all, from as high as eagles."

I'm wondering what it looks and feels like to "pay attention," to tap into "what is essential" for oneself (these were the key invitations for reflection for the day) - such that one is so in tune with one's "single necessity" and can yield to it.  What are the practices that do and will help me pay attention?  What would it look like for me to yield to single necessity, to respond to my calling with complete abandon?  

We explored some common practices of folks who pay good attention, and I explored some of my own.  As I attempt to tend to these practices, I hope to "live like a weasel."  I think I've had some pretty keen "weasel" moments already in life - I don't know how else I would have gotten here.  And I hope to let my "weasel" self lead me in each next phase.