Change is in the air

Change is in the air, readers.

We all know about the big world change. No-one who has a Substack is not writing about the big, terrible, system-destroying world change.

Less well-known is that change is in the air for me, too.

I can’t tell you all about it yet; it is still swirling and emerging. But it is very exciting, and it has implications for our Living Library.

I need to pause the Library for a period, while I figure out just what everything looks like and how this newsletter can transform to be part of the new things that are coming. Paid subscribers - your subscriptions will pause automatically. Everyone else - do hang in there until we return.

In the meantime, as we go out into this pause, I wanted to share Mary Oliver’s poem Wild Geese.

Everyone from the internet knows Wild Geese; it was already a meme years ago.

Don’t think I share it because I found a shiny new thing (although if it is new to you HOO BOY do I envy you, both because you haven’t encountered it yet and because your life must be so beautifully offline).

I share it because it has for a long time been a guidepost for me in what I do and how I do it. It underlies my coaching philosophy, my creative philosophy, my being a person philosophy. It returns me to myself when I forget all those things.

And it will be with me as the next thing I am doing takes shape. So I share it with you like a little poem bridge, allowing us to hold hands from here to there.

Wild Geese

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.

May you be good to yourself and all the systems you are part of in the coming months

May your systems be good to you too

May this time of destructive and terrifying change make clear how much we all need to take our place in the family of things

Until next time (soon)

Katie

Thanks for reading The Living Library, where we grapple with complexity and humanity and all the good stuff. Here are some highlights from issues past: