Honk if you hear the world calling to your imagination
Drawing the geese, and saying goodbye
And already, every day, there are fewer and fewer geese. It’s eerily quiet.
The city describes it as a “humane relocation,” which, I suppose, is better than the alternative. I emailed the city rep to ask more about what they meant by that. I spent a long time composing my email, trying to sound like a reasonable human being and not some goose fanatic. I finally sent it after business hours and didn’t expect a reply until at least the next day. But within 30 minutes I received an extremely detailed response acknowledging that I “have developed a deep and thoughtful appreciation for the natural environment,” and it even validated my suggestion: “We agree that part of the solution includes helping the public understand more about the species, their habits, and how we can coexist responsibly.”
Dear reader, I’m an English professor. I know when I’ve received something written by AI.
Do you know the poem “Wild Geese” by Mary Oliver? It’s often quoted in a variety of contexts. One of my favorite lines is: “the world offers itself to your imagination,/calls to you like the wild geese—harsh and exciting.” I love that image of the world calling to us, harsh like a goose (honk!), offering itself to our imaginations.
But our imaginations seem so limited sometimes. We don’t answer the call of the world. We get rid of the geese. We use AI to reply to our emails.
And these feel like microcosms of much, much larger problems.
I’ll end by quoting this line from the poem:
And I’ll hope that it’s true.
“Meanwhile,” as Mary Oliver says in the poem, “the world goes on.”
Thus:
I’m offering a 4-week Graphic Storytelling Workshop. It starts next weekend.
Last week I was interviewed on Substack Live by
. We talked about visual storytelling and my journey as a writer who started drawing. See a clip here. I’ll send the whole interview to paid subscribers later this week.Thanks for reading The Habit of Art by Kelcey Ervick, a Substack Featured Publication (twice!). I love writing and drawing these posts and am grateful to everyone who follows along. I’m an author and professor in Indiana, and I live on the banks of the St. Joseph River where the geese are gone.
-Kelcey
Sorry they took your geese away then hid behind an AI response. There are a lot of geese in our city, Victoria BC. Many many crows too, plenty of ravens, and a healthy population of bald eagles. Seagulls of course, shit hawks they may be rudely nicknamed, but watching them ride the wind is edifying. I like to stop and watch birds, not just the big ones, the tiny ones too, hopping on the path to peck a microseed then darting back to a safe branch. Here's a few lines from a song of mine that features geese.... At dusk bats' acrobatics / the geometry of geese in flight / these are the charms I use / to defend against the night.
Nature is messy. Seagulls, geese, dogs and bugs - all messy. Trees are messy (our council often removes trees for this reason)… When we ‘clean’ things up like this … it becomes … well, like an AI-generated response. I’m sorry for your goslings.