You do not have to be good.

But what does liberation feel like?

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When my first book came out in 2008, my mom and I did a road trip from Seattle down to San Francisco—laughing, drinking martinis, and reveling in the beauty of the ocean all along the way. I would stop in bookstores and do readings. It was novel and ridiculous—a dream come true. One thing I remember vividly from that trip (other than the epic and inevitable hangry meltdown in Ashland) was that we memorized Mary Oliver’s poem “Wild Geese” along the way. You know the one—perhaps the most beloved of all of Mary’s beloved poems with the earth shattering revelation right from the start:

You do not have to be good.

If only I’d internalized that poem while memorizing it. If only I—today, in this moment, as I write these words—understood on some cellular level that being good was a basic goal, socialization’s boring substitute for liberation.

Being good is checkmarks and expectations, shallow breathing and anxiety in the middle of the night. Liberation is dangerously fresh knowing and acting on it—wholeness, breaking free from broken systems and cultures, hearing and seeing other people with as little assumption as possible, feedback, shifting, laughing, learning, emerging, quieting down, delighting. Being good is weighty. Liberation is lightness. Being good is attachment. Liberation is non-attachment. Being good is individualistic and, at its widest aperture, interpersonal. Liberation is collective.

I’m squinting at liberation these days. I feel it, then I lose it. I hear it, then it fades away in the presence of louder sounds. I know what it isn’t. It isn’t reading the radical book and talking about it a lot, but not feeling like it’s made it’s way into your behavior and bones. It isn’t talking yourself out of guilt or bludgeoning yourself with it. It isn’t perfecting your own ethical identity with self-satisfying tweaks and symbols. It isn’t fast, big, calculated, careful.

In a recent podcast I listened to at my brother’s recommendation, Dr. Bayo Akomolafe, a professor, thinker, father, partner, asks:

In what ways does being good become an exoskeleton that chains us to the ground with the presumption that the universe is morally coherent?

This, too, I am coming to understand, and oh it is so hard for me. Liberation does not assume moral coherence. I really, really crave moral coherence—in myself, in others, in systems. Liberation, instead, assumes flux and flow and backlash and unpredictable leaps forward. It isn’t afraid of dirty hands or feet, or generational timelines, or contradictions, paradoxes, and tensions. Being good wants a strategic plan and dutiful soldiers. Liberation wants heat maps and collaborators who surprise the hell out of each other.

Why am I telling you all of this?

I guess because I’m squinting and I’m hoping you’ll help me see.

When do you sense that you are trying to be good, that you are walking through the desert on your knees, and when do you sense that you are liberating yourself and others? How does the difference feel? How do you get more used to the lightness of liberation? How do you try easier? How do you not lose your childlike hatred of hypocrisy but shed your attachment to moral coherence? How do you make liberation tantalizing rather than goodness compulsory? And, of course, how do we parent, befriend, partner, teach, care for our elders in such a way that we prize liberation, not goodness?