You can hear me read this essay here.
Let us consider together the sacred poem “Wild Geese” by Mary Oliver. You probably know it.
You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees For a hundred miles in 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 can’t imagine another poem that has been read more often in yoga classes, including my own. You can hear Mary Oliver herself read it here, part of a rare interview she did with Krista Tippett in the last few years of her life. The conversation includes the intriguing fact that Oliver wrote the poem largely as a teaching exercise on the power of end-stopped lines, which conclude with a period rather than flowing from one line to the next. She didn’t plan the content, just attended to the form and her wisdom flowed forth.
I love the poem for so many reasons. These days, I’m drawn to it because the last line concisely names my basic motivation for the nature reconnection classes I’ve been running since June:
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 think the world is indeed calling to us, yearning for us to re-member our belonging in the larger family of life. And we are so lonely; our loneliness metastasizing into pathological behaviors of all kinds. But sometimes the geese aren’t flying, or if they are, we are head-down in an email. Sometimes we just have the quiet companionship of a linden tree in the parkway or a determined dandelion.
Mary Oliver spent her life cultivating a keen sensitivity to her More Than Human family (after her human parents treated her terribly). We may need some practice, too. The method of mindful outdoor experience that I learned at Kripalu is one such practice, as is forest bathing and a growing number of other “nature therapy” modalities.
Much dwells in the phrase “harsh and exciting”. Chicagoland has quite a few year-round geese that live the lush life on office park lawns. They fly over to the lake occasionally and exchange some breezy, in-flight banter. But have you heard the geese calling during migration, in dozens or hundreds, high in the clean blue air? There is indeed a wild edge there, as they undertake a grave journey.
This one word - “harsh” - reminds me that death presides over this family of things. The forest ready to eat us, given the chance. Evolution’s exuberant proliferation of forms is powered by the two-stroke engine of life and death; each death a bit of feedback for the algorithm, ceaselessly searching for adaptations that enable more life; each death creating food for more life.
That is all to say, I don’t find it surprising or blameworthy that we humans have sought some distance from the harshness of the world, some safety and comfort in all our machines and climate-controlled spaces. For all the lamentable, ecocidal tendencies of our species, I cannot view us as “unnatural”, for did we not emerge from the same evolutionary incentives of survival and reproduction as all other life? To treat human activity as uniquely bad - categorically distinct from the thrust and parry of predator and prey - is ultimately to reinforce the Story of Separation1 that underwrites so much of the ongoing desecration.
Oliver insists we don’t have to be good or walk on our knees repenting, dismissing the notion that the sinful human species requires a moral superstructure to bound our base instincts. Instead, she makes the radical proposal: “You only have to let the soft animal of your body / Love what it loves.” Contra millenia of religious suspicion, she points us back towards the body as a source of guidance.
This line alone many explain why this poem is so often read in modern yoga. Themes of trusting the body, honoring feelings and following inner guidance abound in the realm of modern wellness practices, in striking contrast to earlier notions of yoga as a discipline for transcending carnal imperfections. Much could be said about this development from a sociological perspective, but I’ll leave that for another essay2.
After teaching thousands of yoga classes, I agree that establishing a trusting relationship with the body is essential before setting off on a heroic yogic quest, should one feel compelled to do such a thing. It’s a matter of basic politeness, really. I can’t show up at the door of an estranged relation and start demanding favors. In the same way, if I’ve spent my life mostly ignoring my body, subjecting it to the demands of the mind, I can’t just plop down on a sticky mat and start yanking my parts around and expect it to go well. Like any relationship, building trust with the body takes time and tolerance for misunderstandings.
So what might it mean to let my animal body love what it loves? Does it mean just doing whatever is sensually pleasing? Because my animal body - thanks to my fruit-eating, tree-dwelling mammalian ancestors - really loves sugar. My social primate ancestry primes me to love being with my tribe, and therefore prone to fear and persecute “outsiders”3. Shall I just allow these desires free reign? What if some of them conflict or hurt others? Thus falls the shadow of Oliver’s injunction or any wellness paradigm that exclusively valorizes “the wisdom of the body”.
We're motley creatures, after all, with a messy family history. Our nervous system complexified because it was advantageous to diversify our behavioral repertoire beyond stimulus and response, beyond stereotyped emotional reactions. The capacity to delay gratification, to restrain anger and prejudice, has served the hominids quite well on the whole and is arguably just as “natural” as our more “uncivilized” drives. To be sure, we've taken things too far and deified rational thinking far beyond what it can honestly accomplish. But rejecting our more recently acquired faculties in favor of romanticized older ones seems unwise and perhaps ungrateful.
And I’m not saying that Oliver was making a formal proposal for proper human conduct in this poem. As I mentioned, it was basically channeled in a writing exercise. Perhaps her advice pertains only to the subject of the poem - how to let the living world wake us from our despair - in which case attuning to the loves of the body is indeed good counsel. But, if you’ll grant me a few more paragraphs, here’s how I might expand this sutra (while ruining the poetry):
First, you have to let your soft animal body love what it loves, then skillfully harness that aliveness and sensitivity to support your service in the world.
This is a middle path: to accept the loves of my animal body, neither suppressing them nor necessarily taking action on them; to let the full energy and intelligence of my sensing/feeling/craving/despising enliven and inform my actions, without giving over to them automatically.
This is a tricky endeavor, to be sure. In many ways, it's simpler to be a dictator and just prohibit certain (or all) feelings, or be a libertine and give total license to others. But either of these extremes tends to rigidity. Inner democracy, where passion and intellectual rigor both have a voice, may be a pain in the ass but it does allow us to integrate more signals and respond to the changing world with more nuance.
I am attempting this approach as I parent my two bottomless pits of wanting (aka my children). “Yes, I know you want more ice cream, that’s very normal…. but you’ve had enough for now. Yes, I totally understand that you're angry at your sister, but you can't pinch her.” This feels better than authoritarian denial, but it sure gets tiring4. Kids have a talent for sensing when parents are most vulnerable to a filibuster. My hope is that the time and effort I invest in shepherding them through their emotional storms now will give them greater capacity to integrate animal and intellect as they grow up. I think a mature modern yoga should aspire to this as well, moving beyond both old notions of transcending the body and newer, well-meaning-but-too-simplistic notions of "just do what feels good".
Finally, let us turn to the middle of the poem, the poignant juxtaposition of our unique human despairs and the stubborn fact that the world goes on regardless. Despite all our dramas, all the outrages perpetrated by humans against each other and the living world… still the rain falls and the geese fly. I feel this confounding truth frequently, glancing up from the catastrophes in my phone to see a squirrel lazily frisking in the sun on top of a worn telephone pole.
Oliver comes back to this theme over and over, such as in the poem “The Lilies Break Open Over the Dark Water”. Her poems flow as a unity, so I can’t really take an excerpt. Oh well, I guess I have to cite the whole thing!
Inside that mud-hive, that gas-sponge, that reeking leaf-yard, that rippling dream-bowl, the leeches’ flecked and swirling broth of life, as rich as Babylon, the fists crack open and the wands of the lilies quicken, they rise like pale poles with their wrapped beaks of lace; one day they tear the surface, the next they break open over the dark water. And there you are on the shore, fitful and thoughtful, trying to attach them to an idea— some news of your own life. But the lilies are slippery and wild—they are devoid of meaning, they are simply doing, from the deepest spurs of their being, what they are impelled to do every summer. And so, dear sorrow, are you.
Just as the lilies cannot do other than surge upwards and blossom, it may well be that we humans cannot do other than search for meaning in the slippery and wild doings of the world, even though any sense we manage to make will ultimately wither. It may be what our species has to offer the Earth, this compulsive weaving of past, present and future into intricate idea-webs that can capture some portion of the immense and beautiful Mystery we dwell within. Our burden is to know despair and sorrow, to know our orderly webs of expectation can be irrevocably torn by a passing storm or bear or bullet. We struggle mightily to escape the brute facts of life and death, and in our struggle we’re making mess of the place, tearing our own webs apart.
In these poems and so many others, Mary Oliver seeks to weave us back into the livingworld, to remind us that we are supremely natural beings and invite us back into the larger family. I feel deep kinship with her, as I feel called to the same work in my yoga teaching and outdoor guiding. In this vein, I have a few new offerings coming up this month, detailed below. Thank you for reading!
Upcoming workshops
See Charles Eisenstein’s work for elaboration of this notion.
Andrea Jain’s Selling Yoga: From Counterculture to Pop Culture and Mark Singleton’s Yoga Body: The Origins of Modern Posture Practice are two stand-out examples of the growing literature on the history of modern yoga.
Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst by Robert Sapolsky is an excellent and entertainingly-written overview of current research.
It takes more energy for the brain to navigate ambiguity than default to stereotyped reactions, as theorized here: fhtttps://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301008217300369