Just listen to this…
“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.”
It’s from Mary Oliver’s poem, Wild Geese; you can read
the whole poem here. Hexagram 53, with its own geese heading home three thousand years earlier, has to do with betrothal to life and marriage into ‘the family of things’.
It really wouldn’t surprise me if Oliver were aware of the I Ching. Even if not, she definitely writes Tao-friendly poetry – almost exclusively nature oriented, with a strong sense of what’s present and now, as well as how it’s changed and will change. Her Twelve Moons cycle is pretty amazing and well worth looking for.
Well, if she does know Yi, I think she’s really ‘got’ Hexagram 53. Or maybe whether she knows it or not…