you do not have to be good.
I wasn't going to write an email today because I just wasn't feeling the inspo. It crossed my mind to write about my tattoo, but I wasn't sure what I wanted to say about it and so I was just going to let today go.
And then I got an email, written to a group of people, that ended with the instruction “and be good.”
My tattoo is the first line of Mary Oliver's poem, “Wild Geese.”
It reads, “You do not have to be good.”
(Universe, you're funny.)
I grew so tired of being told to “be good” and being driven by the fear of not “being good” that I got it tattooed on my body.
You do not have to be good.
To me, this message doesn't give us license to be cruel or uncaring or unkind.
It means - you do not have to abandon yourself, twist yourself into knots, sacrifice your spirit in order to fit someone else's definition of what it means to “be good” - especially when that definition doesn't mesh with your own truth & true nature and when that someone else's primary motivation is to control you.
You are inherently good. You have a strong sense of when you are in integrity with yourself and when you are not.
I can't count the number of choices I've made in my life in an effort to fit someone else's definition of “good.” The irony is those choices made me a worse version of myself. I had less patience with others, less kindness to offer, less authenticity and genuine connection.
When I am following my own definition of “good” (the desires of my true nature), I am more free. I have more energy to give to other people. More kindness and acceptance. More authentic connection.
What choices are you making right now in an effort to fit someone else's definition of “good”?
Can you see how their definition has nothing to do with you and more to do with their own conditioning, pain, fears, etc?
What is your definition of good when it comes to this choice? How do you sense it in your body?
“You do not have to be good…You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.”
Love,
Jessica
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
Wild Geese
