“Faith is the bird that feels the light and sings when the dawn is still dark.” ~Rabindranath Tagore

There is a story of Tagore's that I read in Osho's Love, Freedom, Aloneness that echos and inspires me so that I will dig it up and share it here.

Wild Geese

This poem never gets old for me. So many of its themes echo relentlessly - self-love, self-forgiveness, our presence in our lovely imperfect bodies, our connection with the wild... Wild geese mate for life; this poem reminds me to mate with aliveness and presence for life.

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 your 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

Egon Schiele

Zwei sich umarmende Frauen, Two Women Hugging, 1911

Die Umarmung (Die Liebenden), The Embrace (The Loving), 1917

“Bodies have their own light which they consume to live: they burn, they are not lit from the outside.” ~ Egon Schiele