Blessings

My mother has this Mary Oliver poem on the fridge, which caused me to give her a few of her books as gifts over the years:

"Wild Geese"

'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.
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 tell how great it is to have your mother endorse a poem that begins "you do not have to be good," and to see it every time you visit home and are about to open the door to food and beer...

My school has me teaching business English on a different schedule for a couple months. I do four hours in the morning and four hours at night. But the first hour in the evening is actually a separate class, where we can do anything that practices advanced skills.

After practicing grammar, reading articles and having discussions, a student informed me that she'd really enjoyed it when a past teacher had brought in poems and literature. Well, I didn't need any encouragement to do so, so I was happy to oblige.

Last night I had them read poems/prayers from this book (given as an Xmas gift by my mother, of course) called "Earth Prayers: 365 Prayers, Poems, and Invocations from Around the World". We didn't get to Mary Oliver, although I had wanted to. We did read Walt Whitman, which the article below informed me was Mary's favorite poet.

So I guess I know whom we'll be reading tonight...