Big Love

Advice from a poem

“You do not have to be good.”

Lately this line, from this poem by Mary Oliver, has come to me. I may be doing dishes, putting my children to sleep, or driving to work, when it comes.

“You do not have to be good.”

I had remembered it rather as: “You do not have to be good. You do not need to crawl on your knees through broken glass.”

Perhaps this is because some of my trials felt more like glass burrowing under my skin, scrapping and cutting into a shin or knee, rather than the drying, blistering, and burning of my body beneath a dessert sun.

Oliver says: “You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees/for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.”

Roles I aimed my goodness for included the good daughter, the good partner, and more recently, the good mother. Though there have been moments of goodness, I have also been bad at all of them.

Oh god – I’m bad at being good!

I do not know where this line, when it comes to me, comes from.

Perhaps this is the message my soul needs at this time. And that is why it comes. To tell me, kindly, ardently, that I do not have to be good.

“You only have to let the soft animal of your body

love what it loves.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,

the world offers itself to your imagination”

(Poem excerpt)