Wherever you wanna go
Hello, friends!
If you visited my study, you’d notice there are Post-it notes everywhere. They’re hanging off of my computer displays.
Good writing is just pointing at things
or
Write the islands
Things like that. But today I’ll tell you about one particular yellow note. It’s right there, just a glance away, any time I’m feeling a little overwhelmed, a little tired, a little trapped.
Meanwhile the wild geese
That’s all it says.
I don’t read a lot of poetry. And I can’t remember where I came across this one in particular. But that line comes from “Wild Geese,” by Mary Oliver.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine
the poem says.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
The title comes from this one bit, just over halfway through the poem:
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again
The poem isn’t subtle. Look, it says, hold up your problems. See how much they matter to the world.
It’s not very different from Carl Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot, which I’ve quoted here so often.
Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives.
and
Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.
and
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
The beginning of Oliver’s poem—
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.
—reminds me of a Patty Griffin song, “Go Wherever You Wanna Go.” Griffin wrote the song for her father when he was dying.
You can go wherever you wanna go
Go wherever you wanna go
Fly up to the moon and say hello now
You can go wherever you wanna go
I thought about this song a lot when my granddad died in January, 2020. He was a veteran who didn’t talk much about his experiences.
You don’t ever have to go to war no more
Never have to go to war no more
He was weary, didn’t move around that easily. He was a father who, not long before, had lost a child.
You can get up on some sunny day and run
Run a hundred miles just for fun now
Heartaches and yesterdays don’t weigh a ton now
You can get up on some sunny day and run
My other grandpa died twenty years ago. Another song by Griffin used to hit me so hard. It was called “Goodbye”:
Occurred to me the other day
You’ve been gone now a couple years
Well, I guess it takes while
For someone to really disappear
I have a sharp memory of driving one afternoon, on a road trip, I think, and that song came on, and I just fell apart.
Today my heart is big and sore
It’s trying to push right through my skin
I won’t see you anymore
I guess that’s finally sinking in
I think about these two men now and then. There’s a framed photo of Grandpa on the wall of my study, and another photo, black-and-white, of him on all fours in the yard, chasing my mother, who at the time was three years old or so. On another wall hangs Granddad’s tie, the one my grandmother gave me to wear from his closet on the day of his funeral. They always seemed so old to me when I was young, both of them retired, their hard-working days behind them, both of them mostly resigned to their armchairs. It seemed they gave so much for their families, and what was left over was so little.
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.
and
You don’t ever have to pay the bills no more
Break a sweat or walk a worried floor now
Working like a dog ain’t what you’re for now
You don’t ever have to pay the bills no more
I don’t have much to add to any of this today. Just thinking a bit lately about my place in things, what I need or want, what I owe, what I give. What any of it means, or what it should mean, or why. And who I miss, too, I guess.
✏️Until next time,
Jg
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