Embodiment Poetry: Celebrating the Body What are your favorite poems that celebrate the body? Today like every other day We wake up empty and scared. Don't open the door of your study And begin reading. Take down a musical instrument. Let the beauty we love be what we do There are hundreds of way to kneel And kiss the earth.     - Rumi Wild Geese by Mary Oliver Dream Work (1986) 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. from A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula LeGuin The wise [girl] is one who never sets [herself] apart from other living things, whether they have speech or not, and in later years [she] strove long to learn what can be learned, in silence, from the eyes of animals, the flight of birds, the great slow gestures of trees. Back to Fun for Girls ages 14-19