Announce Your Place in the World

[David Baxter PhD]

Announce Your Place
by Robert T. Muller, The Trauma & Mental Health Report
July 24, 2017

Part of the human experience involves pondering questions about one?s life and purpose. For some, living small and hiding from the world can be a tempting way to quell existential anxiety. Deeply inspired by nature, American poet Mary Oliver urges readers to embrace the world within your reach, no matter how lonely or perhaps afraid you may be, and to claim your place in it.


Wild Geese

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 your 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.

More About Mary Oliver

Poetry by Mary Oliver- The Journey, Wild Geese, Morning Poem and Others
Mary Oliver | Poetry Foundation
Mary Oliver - Poet | Academy of American Poets
Mary Oliver Quotes (Author of New and Selected Poems, Vol. 1)
Mary Oliver - Wikipedia
Mary Oliver - Facebook Page - Maintained by her Publisher

 

[David Baxter PhD]

Mary Oliver Quotes (Author of New and Selected Poems, Vol. 1)

?Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?? ~ Mary Oliver

?Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this too, was a gift.? ~ Mary Oliver

?I believe in kindness. Also in mischief. Also in singing, especially when singing is not necessarily prescribed.? ~ Mary Oliver

?You must not ever stop being whimsical. And you must not, ever, give anyone else the responsibility for your life.? ~ Mary Oliver, Wild Geese

?When it's over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.? ~ Mary Oliver

?Hello, sun in my face. Hello you who made the morning and spread it over the fields...Watch, now, how I start the day in happiness, in kindness.? ~ Mary Oliver

?The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.? ~ Mary Oliver

?Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?? ~ Mary Oliver

?Love yourself. Then forget it. Then, love the world.? ~ Mary Oliver, Evidence: Poems

?It is better for the heart to break, than not to break.? ~ Mary Oliver