What does it look like when we honor our human? I mean, your human: the beast, the wild one, the creature within that is unique to you. The part of you with hair in the wrong places and impulses and an insatiable hunger in life. The part of you that releases body odor like you were meant to have your very own perfume. The part that shows teeth and expresses emotion with grunts and sighs. The one who waits, evaded by time, on the soft shores of the majestic, poised for its moment to roar.
It may take some time to learn the language, but you were given a human so that you might build that bridge. Here is Wild Geese, an embodiment of radical belonging in the world:
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 wild geese, harsh and exciting -
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
Mary Oliver Wild Geese
this is sacred space 