Wild Geese By 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.

This Mary Oliver poem has really been speaking to me recently.

Rainshadow is both working and wild. We grow food — and a lot of it — to feed you, your families, our farmers, and our neighbors.

And still, this place remains untamed. We honor the natural beauty of the land: its ecosystems, its predators and prey. Elk migrate across our fields. Geese travel overhead in sweeping seasonal arcs.

We don’t just grow food for our own small ecosystem; we are part of something much larger, more interconnected than we can fully see. The world offers itself to our imagination, and Rainshadow is a living example of what can happen when you let that imagination run wild and gather the people who believe in that kind of wild alongside you.