Mary Oliver
Poet
"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." --'The Wild Geese'
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Mary Oliver’s poems speak to me and connect me to that great and shining largeness that holds all. Anyone who wrought such connections to the All of the All of Everything has to be celebrated, simply must be celebrated in an ongoing fashion. I think inclusion in the Lesser Feast & Fasts is absolutely right for Mary Oliver, who connects so many to so Much, bringing us in through many different doors and metaphors.