You do not have to be good

Words to live by. (From chapter 5 of Keep Going )

Mary Oliver has died. I have a friend who used to keep her poem “Wild Geese” folded up in his wallet. It begins:

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.

Here she is reading it:

She grew up in Maple Heights, Ohio, about a half hour southeast of where I’m typing this. When she gave a (rare) reading in...