The world offers itself to your imagination
Copyright Guillaume Chabral on Unsplash
The title for today’s blog post comes from the poem “Wild Geese” by Mary Oliver. It’s one of my very favorite poems, and I put Oliver up there in my personal poetry pantheon along with Robert Frost, Naomi Shihab Nye, T.S. Eliot, Kay Ryan, and William Butler Yeats. (I encourage you to click this link and read the whole poem, then come on back.)
The poem says “Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,/ the world offers itself to your imagination, . . ./over and over announcing your place/in the family of things.”
Isn’t that just beautiful?
No matter who you are, no matter how isolated or lonely you may feel, still the world offers itself to you and to your creativity and imagination. The world claims you as part of the family of things in the world, whether you can see it at the moment or not.
These days, it can feel like each of us is isolated inside our own stress bubble.
How else to explain the folks who lash out at the slightest possible provocation, or sometimes without there seeming to be any reason at all apart from an innate desire to make other people miserable?
How else to explain how many of us feel like outliers, when a brief conversation with someone else shows us points of similarity and connection?
With the world being topsy-turvy these days, including so many disastrous decisions by the current US administration that it is almost impossible to even enumerate them all, let alone process the thoughts and feelings that they evoke. They seem bent on destruction: of our norms (the wholesale rounding up of people—some of them citizens—to pack them into literal warehouses, where they are treated worse than livestock; the attempts to rollback the right to vote, the refusal to go after the wealthy white men listed in files because the president is one of them), of our lands (the US Forest Service was just decimated, they are trying to take away protected status from many National Parks), and of our world itself (the unjustified attacks on other countries, now including Iran, where UNESCO-protected buildings that have stood since antiquity have been completely obliterated, along with other war crimes including the bombing of a girls’ school, killing over a hundred children).
And that is before the fall-out from those decisions impacts us all personally, in the loss of coworkers, or of jobs. In the rising prices of food, clothing, and gasoline. In the harms to our environment. In the personal affront that we all feel as a result of many of these things, that we are expected to ignore or move past. Because we are always expected to suck it up and keep on keeping on, with a smile on our faces.
I’m here to tell you that you don’t have to smile. And that you owe it to yourself to acknowledge the wrongs affecting you.
“The world offers itself to your imagination” means that you get to see what is there, but still imagine something better.
I personally choose to imagine the coming of a matriarchal society, where the vulnerable—including children, trans folks and other members of the LGBTQ family, minorities, the disabled, and more—are protected.
Where men (and others) who do wrong are held to account in ways that matter.
Where corporations and the extremely wealthy pay their fair share of taxes in order to fund things that matter, like health care for all, food and housing assistance for those in need, universal childcare and better education.
So no, I don’t—and you don’t—have to smile and pretend everything is fine. But we do have to start creating the world we imagine, starting now. The old world may be crumbling, but those of us who want a different sort of new world in its place need to start acting on that right now.
I am currently in the process of imagining and bringing into being a sort of network of matriarchal women who are ready to do what they can to create a better world. We will do it together by starting to live in a supportive matriarchy now. By leaning into cyclical living instead of expecting linear, superior performance day after day. By choosing at least one vulnerable group to work on protecting now, without waiting for the death throes of the white supremacist patriarchy to finish up.
In the meantime, you can catch this GenX witch living mindfully, and trying not to get swept into dismay or disarray by current events or whatever is coming next. I invite you to join me.
If you’d like one-on-one coaching, I have three openings for new bookings at the moment.
And I always have time to read tarot for you.