The Wild Goose Blues

Yesterday I spent most of the day learning to play a song I had written myself. I called it The Wild Goose Blues. On paper it looked simple enough. A few chords, a rhythm I thought I knew well, and a melody that had come to me as naturally as breath. Yet when I tried to play it, the song resisted me. The chords felt clumsy. The rhythm refused to settle. What had seemed easy in my head demanded far more of me in practice.

It was frustrating at first. But as the hours passed, I began to see that the song itself was teaching me. It was stretching me beyond the safe ground of what I already knew. It was pushing me to grow, to expand my playing, and in the process, to expand myself.

This is how the Spirit often works. In the Celtic tradition, the Holy Spirit is not only the gentle dove, but also the wild goose: fierce, untamed, and unpredictable. The wild goose will not let us stay in the comfort of the familiar. It calls us to new horizons, unsettling us so that we might grow.

The Unpredictable Spirit

When I wrestled with The Wild Goose Blues, I realised I was encountering something of the untamed Spirit. Like the song, the Spirit often leads us to places that at first feel beyond us. We might imagine that faith will be simple if we only believe hard enough, pray often enough, or keep ourselves safe within the familiar. But the Spirit is not safe. It pushes us into growth, and growth is rarely comfortable.

The Celtic saints knew this well. To them, the Spirit was not a tame house-guest, but the One who drove them into exile, onto stormy seas, into lands unknown. To follow Christ was to set out without a map, trusting that the Spirit of the living God would guide and protect, not by keeping danger away but by shaping them through the journey itself.

And isn’t this what Jesus promised? “The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit” (John 3:8). The Spirit is like the wind — unpredictable, uncontrollable, yet always moving with purpose.

The Simplicity That Costs Everything

It is one thing to see something written on the page. It is another to live it out in practice. The gospel is, in one sense, beautifully simple: love God, love your neighbour. Yet anyone who has tried to live these words knows they are anything but easy. Love costs us everything. Forgiveness is simple to speak of, but it requires the surrender of pride. Trusting God is simple to affirm, but hard when storms rise around us.

Paul understood this paradox. In his letter to the Philippians, he confessed, “Not that I have already obtained this or have already reached the goal; but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own” (Philippians 3:12). Even the great apostle admitted that following Christ was not about reaching perfection easily, but about pressing on, stumbling forward, and letting Christ’s Spirit do the work of transformation.

Learning The Wild Goose Blues became, for me, a parable of this truth. What seemed simple demanded patience, humility, and persistence. And in the struggle, something more beautiful was being formed — not only in the music, but in me.

The Song Beneath the Song

Every one of us has a song to learn, and most often it is not the one we expect. Life looks simple on paper, yet when we live it out, it asks everything of us. This is not a failure. This is the Spirit’s way. The Wild Goose Blues plays through every life — a melody of grace that invites us to stretch, to stumble, to rise again.

The Celts believed that God’s presence saturates everything — the sea and the sky, the work of our hands, the rhythms of our breathing. To learn the song of life is to attune ourselves to this presence. And often it is the very difficulties, the resistant places, that open our ears to the deeper melody.

When you come to something that feels harder than it looked on paper — a task, a calling, a relationship, even your own inner journey — perhaps this is the Wild Goose inviting you deeper. Not to defeat you, but to draw you into transformation.

Pressing On in Faith

So I will keep learning The Wild Goose Blues. I will keep fumbling for the chords until my hands learn the shapes and my heart settles into the rhythm. And I will trust that, in the same way, the Spirit is teaching me to live.

Faith is not about perfection. It is about being willing to be taught. It is about pressing on, even when the music feels beyond us. It is about believing that the Wild Goose is not mocking us, but leading us — sometimes through stormy skies, sometimes into unfamiliar places, always toward the heart of God.

And perhaps the question is not, “Is this easy?” but rather, “Am I willing to be changed by the learning?”

Because in the end, every hard-won chord, every stumbled rhythm, every hour of practice becomes part of the greater song — the song of the Spirit, untamed and beautiful, calling us onward.

✨ The Wild Goose Blues is always playing. The invitation is to listen, to learn, and to let it change you.