Before you go on further, I would like to issue a trigger warning: I mention some things about trauma and abuse, and while there aren’t any specific details, if these topics make you uncomfortable, please take care.
You do not have to be good.
In my first year of high school, at the age of 14, I came to the conclusion that I had been holding onto a secret for far too long.
And so, on a relatively normal night, after dinner had been eaten and the table cleared, I ran into my room, sitting alone for an amount of time that felt, all at once, like a few minutes and a few hours, fleeting and endless. I was frantic, yet a calm, steady voice whispered past the pounding heart in my chest: tell them.
And then I did: I told my family about how I endured sexual abuse at the hands of a family member for years in silence.
I can’t make out the details, truthfully, about how it all started, what my first day was like with this truth out in the world–traumatic events have a way of blurring your days together–but one day I was in therapy, sitting on a couch in front of a bubbly, vibrant, hippie-ish (in the most loving way possible) woman who took my dark truths from me, set them aside, and let me leave them there.
She asked me what I liked to do, and I listed off my hobbies: I like reading; I always have. I love musical theatre, and I can’t help but sing along to music, as if I’m part of it. I like to draw and paint.I write poetry.
That seemed to strike a chord: one day, she handed me a sheet of paper and asked me to read what was on it.
You do not have to be good. It felt like an affirmation. A command–gentle, but firm. I continued:
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 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 fell in love instantly, even if I didn’t understand it all at first.
Wild Geese became the safety blanket I clung to when I felt the trauma creeping in like a dark fog, cutting through it like a beam from a lighthouse. I would trace the words over and over in my mind until I nearly memorized the whole poem.
When I could no longer stand in a crowded room without it spinning: You do not have to be good.
When the rage burned through my stomach: You do not have to be good.
When I was asked, too early, far too early, if I could learn what forgiveness felt like: You do not have to be good.
When my body was confused and feeling something that wasn’t there. When I couldn’t sleep. You do not have to be good.
Mary Oliver and I, as I’ve come to learn, have gone through some very similar experiences in life. Mary Oliver knew what it felt to be trapped in a body–and knew how words and the gentle hum of nature continuing its work in spite of constant suffering could make freedom feel possible. She knew what rage felt like.
She carried trauma, heavy, dark, ugly trauma, and yet continued to fall in love in many ways: with the romantic poets who inspired her to put pen to paper, with the brutal world around her, with her lover Molly Malone Cook.
When Mary Oliver passed away a few months ago, I found a rare clip of her reading her work aloud and played it on my drive home.
As I turned onto my road, she began, in her steady voice, to read Wild Geese, and I began to weep in the way one does when they hear something so deeply beautiful that they miss it as soon as it starts.
Friday night, I made my favorite poem an indelible part of me, and I couldn’t be happier.
Thank you, Mary, for giving me Wild Geese.
Bookish Kristen 