Where the Wild Things are God

My Yuletide Kitchen Wilderness and Me

Photo by natsuki on Unsplash

Wild Geese

(by Mary Oliver)

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.

There is a forest on my windowsill.

We do this every year, bringing inside a variety of evergreen branches to create a wild wood for our growing collection of woodland creatures: a brown bear; a grey rabbit; two foxes, one grey and one red; two pinecone hedgehogs, gifts from two of my soul sisters and the most enchanting of all the wee beasties; a bewildered looking fawn in a Christmas scarf; and now two owls—one made by Lee in a co-op art class, and one fuzzy and grey, like the young owls that let us get close and watch them three separate, magical evenings this summer. Our forest grows along with our collection each year, getting appropriately more dense with its layers of Hemlock, Eastern White Pine, Northern White Cedar, and the two other types of evergreen growing nearby that I haven’t learned the names for yet, but I will. It is becoming a spiritual practice to know the living things that share the sunlight, rain, air, and earth with me, here.

Alongside the other wild creatures, four tiny wood elves flash their colorful felt clothing like the plumage of indigenous birds, secretive and precious. I wish I knew the spell that would let me enter this world I recreate each Yuletide. I wish to creep through the fragrant branches, to pick a favorite spot and settle there, next to an elf. I wish to ask them if they remember the girl who made them, years ago, before the illness that unmade her. I wish I knew what it was like to be brought to life by someone’s nimble fingers and imagination. I wish to look into their tiny, Sharpie drawn faces and see something of her reflected there, some lingering trace of the powerful, creative spirit that brought them into this world and saw fit to bestow them upon me. Of her I wrote, during that first anguished winter without her,

you left slivers of yourself behind
in each of us
they draw us, magnetically
when two or more of us gather
and speak your magic name
those shavings start to glow
forming the outline
of the one we want most
to see

When someone who was essential to our being leaves our lives, everything they ever touched glows softly with an inner light that only we can see. I have several such decorations: a snowman Rose made for Rena out of an old sock, googly eyes, and felt accessories; a teeny white angel made out of a crocheted lace doily that still has the tiny tag she attached with an even tinier safety pin, with “for Melody” written in her childish hand; the red poinsettia garland she made out of felt (she LOVED working with felt, you see) and gave me for Christmas a couple of years before she died. There is an extra bit of someone left behind in the things they made with their own hands, and Rose loved making gifts for her family and friends. It is how we hold her close now that she is out of reach.