So, a good friend left us yesterday. Mary Oliver is and was a poet of enormous inspiration in the lives of many people I really respect. She died yesterday. I found her to be right on the edge of everything, of risk, life, death, of everything.

I am rewriting one of her poems I find to be electric, resonant, and quite possibly a masterpiece. It is one of her most famous poems, and I am repeating it below. When I read this, the cosmic unknown makes more sense.

Wild Geese by 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 lonley,

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.