making real, among sorrows & songs

i love the dark hours of my being.
my mind deepens into them.
there i can find, as in old letters,
the days of my life, already lived,
and held like a legend, and understood.

then the knowing comes: i can open
to another life that's wide and timeless.

so i am sometimes like a tree
rustling over a gravesite
and making real the dream
of the one its living roots
embrace:

a dream once lost
among sorrows and songs.

{i,5 from rilke's 'book of hours'}

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some rilke to break your teeth and spark your soul

if we imagine our being as a room of any size,
it seems that most of us know only
a single corner of that room,
a spot by the window, a narrow strip
on which we keep walking back and forth.
that gives a kind of security.
but isn't insecurity with all its dangers
so much more human?

we are not prisoners of that room.

i have great faith in all things not yet spoken.
i want to free what waits within me
so that what no one yet has dared to wish for
may for once spring clear
without my contriving.

if this is arrogant, God, may i be forgiven,
but what i need to say is this:
may what i do flow from me like a river,
without anger, without timidness,
no forcing and no holding back.

then in these swelling and ebbing currents,
these deepening tides moving out, returning,
i will sing You as no one ever has,
streaming through widening channels
into the open sea.

{rainer maria rilke} 

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you will know it by its seriousness.

for several years i've had an intense and yet far-off appreciation of rainer maria rilke. i read his "letters to a young poet" and practically underlined everything - wowed by the simple language that somehow housed a myriad of thoughts and feelings i thought were beyond words. for some reason i didn't follow my normal extreme of hunting down everything he'd ever written and reading all of those, too. until recently. a few weeks ago i bought his "book of hours" and another book of his religious poetry. hours is killing me.

on rilke, wikipedia states: "his haunting images focus on the difficulty of communion with the ineffable". i laughed when i read that. yes! that is exactly what he does. ineffable - incapable of being expressed or described in words. and yet - he does. whew.

several years ago a friend sent me a rilke quote after seeing one of my photographs. i finally found where the quote came from when i started flipping through hours.



i am circling around God, around the ancient tower,
and i have been circling for a thousand years,
and i still don't know if i am a falcon,
or a storm, or a great song.

but below is my favourite rilke thus far. i still can't fully believe that it's real. it's that good.

God speaks to each of us as He makes us,
then walks with us silently out of the night.

these are the words we dimly hear:

you, sent out beyond your recall,
go to the limits of your longing.
embody Me.

flare up like flame
and make big shadows I can move in.

let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
just keep going. no feeling is final.
don't let yourself lose Me.

nearby is the country they call life.
you will know it by its seriousness.

give Me your hand.

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