As the earth cycle turns toward spring here in the middle lands, the claxon of Canada geese returning north fills my soul with a profound sense of belonging to the wildness of existence. Perhaps Mary Oliver says it best in one of her most well-known poems, “Wild Geese”:
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.
In this family of things, I find my wild soul.
“Wildness” lies not merely in the creatures of this earth. It suffuses the universe. It is the self-generating force of creation, the ongoing flaring forth of existence, from the original explosion of all matter to the rising of pasqueflowers in your garden or local meadow in early spring. Yet wildness manifests less in matter itself than in the relationships among the web of existence, the entangled net of interbeing that binds us to the squirrel in our backyard, the bluestem of our prairies, the flowing waters of our streams, the towering trees of our forests, the generativity of our soil’s microorganisms, and the birth of new stars and galaxies. Our reverence for and practice of wildness constitutes the spirituality of our cosmic interconnection.
In his book A Hidden Wholeness, Parker Palmer defines soul as “the core of pure being … a seed of selfhood that contains the spiritual DNA of our uniqueness—an encoded birthright knowledge of who we are, why we are here, and how we are related to others … The soul persistently calls us back to our birthright form, back to lives that are grounded, connected, and whole.” I find my grounding, my connectedness, and my wholeness—my soul—in the fractal wonder of the living and life-giving universe. I seek the interweaving of my love for the song of the white-throated sparrow in my backyard with my awe at the fiery furnaces of stars aborning, galaxies and light years away. I yearn to understand the impulse that said—and says—“May it be so.” My soul, my core of pure being, seeks after this local and cosmic wildness—and everything in between and beyond—and it seeks after its own place in this cosmic web. That is my spirituality.
The great conservationist Aldo Leopold said in his masterpiece A Sand County Almanac, “One swallow does not make a summer, but one skein of geese, cleaving the murk of a March thaw, is the spring.” As I lift my ears and eyes to the thawing sky when I hear the telltale honking of Canada geese approaching, my wild soul resonates, giving rise to a spiritual experience that reveals how I am embedded in the family of things, both large and small.
—Thomas Dean
