Yesterday Mary Oliver died.
A quote from her poem “The Summer Day” inspired my very first daily post, “Life is Wild and Precious, Be Present” :
“Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”
Today a short musing on poetry as a way to express beauty and the beauty of what it means to be human.
As regular readers know, I am very much focussed on “Beautiful Leadership”, encouraging leaders of businesses and organisations of all types to be more beautiful in how they lead.
Key to this is exploring and understanding beauty so that it becomes part of who we are, so it becomes natural to lead from beauty.
As Mary Oliver passes, it occurs to me once again that some forms of artistic self-expression have deep capability to express the beauty of what it is to be human. Dance, Music, Painting, Sculpture certainly and also just as certainly, Poetry.
As you explore beauty yourself, find the art and expression that most speaks to you.
I leave you today with another poem from Mary Oliver, along with a video of her reading 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.