Three Things to Remember As long as you’re dancing, you can break the rules. Sometimes breaking the rules is just extending the rules. Sometimes th… - Mary Oliver

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 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.

Still, what I want in my life
is to be willing
to be dazzled — to cast aside the weight of facts

and maybe even
to float a little
above this difficult world.

And there you are
on the shore,

fitful and thoughtful, trying
to attach them to an idea — some news of your own life.
But the lilies

are slippery and wild — they are
devoid of meaning, they are
simply doing,
from the deepest

spurs of their being,
what they are impelled to do
every summer.
And so, dear sorrow, are you.