Earth Prayer for the day...

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 mind.
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 are,
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.


--Mary Oliver

(no subject)

I really should think more before I take on transcription projects. These projects are all personal, by the way. They have nothing to do with work. I undertake these projects because (a) I think the information is important, (b) I don't want the information to be *lost*, and (c) because I want to *master* the information, i.e., I want to understand it in a way that just reading it won't do.

But somewhere in there, when I'm trying to decipher someone's crabbed or undecipherable handwriting (usually in pencil, mind you), or make out what's on 30 or 40 year old faded photocopies of photocopies, I really begin to question my sanity.

And at the moment, I'm doing TWO of these projects. What WAS I thinking?