Wild Geese

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

loves 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

are heading home again

Whoever you are no matter how lonely,

the world offers itself to your imagination,

call to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting

over and over announcing your place

in the family of things

~ Mary Oliver

Reflections West

In the West, there are three things that you can always count on; thistles, wind, and fences. Along roads between homes, towns, and cities of the West you will find, somewhere, a fence line. It may travel with you for miles and miles, or peel away down a canyon, or over a ridge, sharing minimal time in your company, yet quietly reminding you, that man is here.

When tearing fence down on the farm, barbed wire becomes like thistles. Hard to handle, yet always needing dealt with, the more you gather wire off an old fence, the more snagged and bristled with rusty spikes the wild, springy loops become. Kicking down the posts themselves is a different experience, filled with a combative flair, and high chance of victory over rotten, tar covered lumber, the only wood within miles. Years and miles of tumbled down fence, filled every time the wind blows with towering piles of gray thistles; cascading into ditches and at times completely blocking roads in drifts reminiscent of snow. Today I tear these barricades down. Freeing a landscape of its daunting fences.

I am told the Natural Resource Conservation Service wants to protect native grasses and streambeds with fences. To keep the possible stray cattle, sheep, deer or 4 wheelers out. To allow the plants a chance to grow and flourish as they once did, long before I was born. So again I am sent to remote parts of the farm property. This time to build fence. Create a wilderness within boarders.

How to strengthen a boundary, mark off an area, put a land to your use. These things you can come to know. It is something we have done, and continue to do daily to the West. Yet no knowledge I have with fence or land, makes me willing or capable of ever defining a land’s true purpose. Some things even a fence, or lack of fence, cannot do.

second photo by Bill Allard