Pictures

"You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves."

Mary Oliver

I'm not a photographer. But I've taken my camera out occasionally, because I have it so I may as well use it, and store images on my computer, just to have. When I'm in a new place or had a bit to drink. To print out and slide under plastic pages of a decorated photo album.

So this one is from Seattle, where we went more than a month ago and stayed with Leslie Phillip's parents in the house she grew up in. The first morning we took a walk around her neighborhood, next to Lake Washington, without a clear destination or goal except to get some air. It was lovely, even in the haze, and when we turned around to go home I saw these geese. There were lots of them, perched along the grass. They were attentive. And I guess, for some reason, I wanted to remember them.

There are a lot of books in our house. Mostly about social justice, written my nuns and Jesuits about their experiences in small villages in central America. Jonathan Kozol's Ordinary Resurrections, Edward Hays's Prayers for the Domestic Church. All good. All pertinent. All very wise. And all things that I'm not very motivated to read on a Sunday late morning while curled up on the couch.

But in my room, I found an anthology called Earth Prayers. There are poems about loving the ground, praising large turtles, escaping your ego while in the forest. And then, there is a poem about Geese, by Mary Oliver. Which I have read everyday since I've discovered it. And has brought me back to the moment in Seattle, as I observed the consolidated force, before going on my way with my new pack of people.

There is something motivating in her words, that gave me small reassurance of what it is to be an individual while living in community, to keep your own self and your own needs, and be at peace with the fact that they will be different from others. I guess it's possible to act together, to create a life for a year in a random house in the middle of northeast Portland, and a little harder to claim exactly what that should look like.