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.
– Mary Oliver
The view is from Liathach in the Scottish highlands. Often regarded, and I agree, as the best walking in Britain with Torridon and Beinn Eighe nearby. Look north in this direction, and the hills become lower with the landscape watery. When a friend saw one of my photographs from Beinn Eighe she said “it’s like the beginning of the world” and I agree.
Wild Geese is one of my favourite poems, from Mary Oliver, consoled by nature as a child then developed into art. There’s more to the poem than the quotation I use, and you can focus wherever you like. It begins “You do not have to be good” and continues addressing you, the reader, in relation to unkind society. There’s a lot of it. So what can you do?
Oliver wandered the woods with a note book. Found meaning in the wild world where spirits are free and embedded in a greater pattern. She loved nature. Refined this into something more and worked the poiesis: etymologically derived from the Greek meaning make, create, associated with but not confined to poetry.
Because meanwhile, meanwhile, meanwhile…