I received this poem in the mail on Friday from my best friend from college. I love getting real mail from a real friend.

Wild Geese

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.

-Mary Oliver

I planted broccoli, tomato, basil, brussels sprouts and cayenne peppers in the middle of March. I knocked over a couple of the tomato pots pre-sprout and my cat knocked over some of the basil. Despite being knocked around a bit, some of the seeds have achieved sprout status.

This morning I pried apart wooden pallets and this afternoon, with help, reassembled them into a raised vegetable garden bed.

Last week I checked out the Girl Culture photography exhibit at the Gallery in Trinity Commons. I recommend the exhibit to anyone who has the time to check it out, but I confess that I left Trinity feeling a little disturbed.

The photographs were selected from some of Lauren Greenfield's books and are photo-journalistic in style. Greenfield collected images of females at fat camps, at inpatient eating disorder clinics, at charm schools, playing dress-up, backstage at strip clubs and other uncomfortable and disordered female situations.

Had I looked at just one or two of the photographs, my reaction would have been, "well, it is too bad for those poor women and boy don't they have problems." However, the pervasiveness of society's unreasonable expectations for women is undeniable when the photos are viewed as a group and I admit my place on that neurotic continuum even though I try to rise above it.

Girl Culture is at the Gallery at Trinity Commons until April 28, 2007.
Exhibit Hours:
Tuesday: 10-6 Friday: 10-6
Wednesday: 1-8 Saturday: 10-3
Thursday: 10-6 Sunday: 10-3
Closed Monday