From 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 wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again...

***
Plein Air Writing Workshop, led by Kathe Izzo, on the grounds of Olana, Hudson, NY, Sunday, September 26, 2010

For this exercise write of home, what connects you to yourself, to nature, to your sense of home...

***
Writing Exercise #2

I feel small in the landscape
and yet there are things
smaller, a dandelion
on the mowed path, out of
season, a single white
butterfly, perusing. I grew
up with the ambient sounds
of train whistles and a
distant highway, trucks
on a hot summer night
miles away on I-95
thrumming outside my
window on a hot night
as a freight train
slowed across the road
and rumbled on and
on and on for half
the night as I lay
thirsty and hungry
perhaps and I'd get up
and creep to the
bathroom at the top of
the stairs and without
turning on the light
stand in the dark and
run the tap and
drink the tepid metallic
water from my hands
so not delicious but
the best I could do
and I'd return to
bed and sink into the
the covers and a
feeling would come
over me that I
couldn't then name
couldn't capture, a
falling, a flying,
a sinking, of being
lost in something much
much bigger than
myself that enveloped
me or wanted to or
I it but I resisted
and jerked awake and
remembered and
finally when I forgot
to look, when I
let myself wander
off, just go, fall
asleep despite it all.