So many Geese

As you may have noticed, I have a great love for Wild Geese. Over time, I have started painting geese everywhere in all colors, shapes, and sizes. You will now find them on canvas, on clay, and on paper. I can’t stop painting them, and after years of doing so, painting geese feels like coming home. It is quiet relaxing and comforting, but also endlessly alive, because I never know exactly who the next bird will become until it slowly reveals itself before me.

Painting so many geese, and having found several poems, books, and essays about these gracious birds in my countless notebooks, made me want to share a little more about how my love for Wild Geese began and how it has stayed with me.

It all started with a story. I think I was between ten and twelve when I read Fly Away Home, a story based on the life of the Canadian artist Bill Lishman. The book follows a young girl named Amy, who has just lost her mum and moved to the countryside to live with her eccentric father. One day, she rescues a whole nest of orphaned goose eggs. As the goslings grow up, they develop a strong bond with Amy, and she and her father set out on the remarkable task of teaching the flock to migrate before winter arrives.

It is a story about grief and healing, about the trusting bond between humans and animals, about resilience, about the fragile beauty of nature, and about the quiet circles of life that carry us.

I fell in love with geese ever since, and I cannot count how many times I acted out the story and wrote different side stories and scenes. My room was full of geese paintings, feathers, and books about geese.

Growing up and learning more about these animals, I felt increasingly connected to and inspired by how social they are.They live in family groups, stay with a mate for life, and speak to one another in honks, hisses, and the silent language of movement and closeness. They raise their goslings together

They are also quite protective, and research suggests they maintain stable friendships. After a flock member dies, they seem to strengthen existing social ties rather than completely reshaping the group, and they spend more time with the remaining flockmates instead of isolating themselves. There is something profoundly tender in that - something steadfast, almost human, and yet entirely their own.

I think these qualities are beautiful, and I believe we can learn a lot from these animals. Another thing that teaches me a great deal is their migration behavior. They naturally move with the seasons. They trust change. They keep going, always in motion with the natural world, as if they understand something ancient and necessary about impermanence.

For me, they symbolize the art of letting go, embracing change throughout life, and living in rhythm with the seasons of our world. I think that carries so much beauty and embodies what it means to be one with nature and with each other - which, to me, is essentially what we are.

There is so much beautiful writing about geese, and one favorite poem always lives somewhere at the back of my mind.

Wild Geese by Mary Oliver

You don´t have to be good.

You don´t 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.

- Lene