On Being Good...

Quite sometime ago, A. directed me to a poem. She did not remember where she had seen it (or so it seems to me now), but she remembered the line "You do not have to be good" (admittedly, a solid opening line). The internet is many things, one of which is a really powerful search tool.
Maybe this is how I found the poem. Maybe A. found it some other way. I'm not sure it matters. It was read, and remembered, and found again, in any case.

Wild Geese

-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.

I'm reading, currently (academically, of course; my recreational reading is ever so much more exciting) about ascetics, monks and assorted other holy peoples. People who most assuredly did walk on their knees in the desert, repenting. They felt they did need to be good. And for our sake, at that (well, for others sakes, anyway; perhaps not ours). They did not let the soft animals of their bodies love what it loved.
Willpower, they say, is a finite thing in a person. When one uses it all up in doing the one thing, there is none left for doing the next. This is why diets fails so spectacularly. One can only be so good for so long, before something gives.
Perhaps I do not need to be good, or to cross the desert on my knees. Maybe I should let the world offer itself to me, and love what I love. Sounds nice, actually. But sometimes I do need to be good. Maybe not desert repenting level good, but good all the same.
Sometimes, I think I'll also love what I love, though. That sounds pleasant enough as well.

"I'll be a ghost for you"

Last weekend, I returned home, that is, to the home of my ancestors. Such trips, as often as I might make them, are never routine, always in their own way momentous. A small, quite momentous, often. Yet still. Going home, is, and always has been, for me, important.
It was a cold rainy weekend, cold even for Metis. Even the unseasonably cold weather on the Island could not compare. Temperatures hovered closer to freezing than to comfortable. The rain didn't help.
But the landscape down home works with the rain, quite well really. The rocky outcroppings, the steel grey water of Le Fleuve, the grey beach and greyer sky. Muted greens and blues. It all hangs together in the mist and the rain. A rainy Metis has its own stately beauty.
There is a Gothic element about the place, in the mist and in the rain. It is always there, really. It is more readily apparent in inclement weather. I am reminded both of the writing of Flannery O'Connor, Joy's wooden leg, and of Annie Proulx's Newfoundland. Canadian Gothic. There is a magic in Metis, under the surface, there.
Oddly, few seem to recognize it. I wracked my brain yesterday, trying to remember one story, just one story, that might be described as a fairy tale, concerning my ancestral home. But I could not. No trolls, or spooks, hobgoblins, changelings, or anything. Sometimes, rarely, there is talk of dreams, and some forecasting of weather with the old ways.  Rarely. Maybe the dour Scots Presbyterians who settled there in the 1800's would brook no such thing, no magic, driving it from the wilderness. Maybe the boom and bust of the hotel years distracted the locals, plunged them headlong into the 20th century, where there is little place for such things. Who knows.
There is magic there, though, and I wouldn't be surprised if it isn't just waiting for the right stories to be told, the right words to be spoken.