Tag: Rainer Maria Rilke

Where Morning Lies

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Will there really be a “Morning”?
Is there such a thing as “Day”?
Could I see it from the mountains
If I were as tall as they?

Has it feet like Water lilies?
Has it feathers like a Bird?
Is it brought from famous countries
Of which I have never heard?

Oh some Scholar! Oh some Sailor!
Oh some Wise Man from the skies!
Please to tell a little Pilgrim
Where the place called “Morning” lies!
~Emily Dickinson

You are the future, the immense morning sky
turning red over the prairies of eternity…

You are the meaning deepest inside things
that never reveals the secret of its owner.
And how you look depends on where we are:
from a boat, you are shore, from the shore a boat.
~Rainer Maria Rilke,  from Love Poems to God from the Book of Hours

I know now what weariness is when the mind stops
and night is a dark blanket of peace and forgetting
and the morning breaks to the same ritual and the same
demands and the silence.
~Jane Clement from No One Can Stem the Tide

I head to clinic this morning
knowing from now on
my work will feel different after today,
no longer the same ritual,
no longer the same demands.

Mornings will be more resonant, depending on where I am:
from the boat I no longer must be shore,
from the shore I no longer need to row the boat.

I can simply be what the patient needs in the moment
and the patient is all I need.

Amen and amen.


Light and Cloud-Shadows

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.…you mustn’t be frightened … if a sadness rises in front of you, larger than any you have ever seen; if an anxiety, like light and cloud-shadows, moves over your hands and over everything you do. You must realize that something is happening to you, that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in its hand and will not let you fall. Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness, any misery, any depression, since after all you don’t know what work these conditions are doing inside you?
~Rainer Maria Rilke from Letters to a Young Poet

…difficulties are magnified out of all proportion simply by fear and anxiety. From the moment we wake until we fall asleep we must commend other people wholly and unreservedly to God and leave them in his hands, and transform our anxiety for them into prayers on their behalf: 
With sorrow and with grief…
God will not be distracted.
~Dietrich Bonhoeffer in Letters from Prison

Every day I see college students who are so consumed by anxiety they become immobilized in their ability to move forward through the midst of life’s inevitable obstacles and difficulties.  They become so stuck in their own overwhelming feelings they can’t sleep or eat or think clearly, so distracted are they by their symptoms.  They self-medicate, self-injure and self-hate.  Being unable to nurture themselves or others, they wither like a young tree without roots deep enough to reach the vast reservoir that lies untapped beneath them.  In epidemic numbers, some decide to die, even before life really has fully begun for them.

I grieve for them in their distress.   My role is to help find healing solutions, whether it is counseling therapy, a break from school, or a medicine that may give some form of relief.  My heart knows the ultimate answer is not as simple as the right prescription.

We who are anxious must depend upon a Creator who does not suffer from attention deficit disorder and who is not distracted from His care for us even when we turn away in worry and sorrow.  We magnify our difficult circumstances by staying so tightly into ourselves, unable to look beyond our own eyelashes.  Instead we are to reach higher and deeper, through prayer, through service to others, through acknowledging there is power greater than ourselves.

So we are called to pray for ourselves and for others,  disabling anxiety and fear and transforming it to gratitude and grace.   No longer withering, we just might bloom.


All Things Sing You

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You come and go. The doors swing closed
ever more gently, almost without a shudder
Of all who move through the quiet houses,
you are the quietest.

We become so accustomed to you,
we no longer look up
when your shadow falls over the book we are reading
and makes it glow. For all things
sing you: at times
we just hear them more clearly.
~Rainer Maria Rilke from The Book of Hours: Love Poems to God

God can be so quiet around us
we scarcely think of Him
tiptoeing around our distractions.

But then a moment of flash,
a rainbow glow,
a subtle sacred song in our ears

and we remember:
He’s here
watching
knowing
holding on to us
reeling us back in
when we drift away.


Tenderness Brushing Tenderness

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Abandon entouré d’abandon, tendresse touchant aux tendresses…
C’est ton intérieur qui sans cesse se caresse, dirait-on;
se caresse en soi-même, par son propre reflet éclairé.
Ainsi tu inventes le thème du Narcisse exaucé.
~Rainer Maria Rilke “Dirait-on” from his French Poetry collection ‘Les chansons de la rose’

Translation:

Abandon enveloping abandon, Tenderness brushing
tendernesses,
Who you are sustains you eternally, so they say;
Your very being is nourished by its own enlightened
reflection;
So you reveal to us the theme of Narcissus redeemed.

So like the Valentine sunrise brushing the sky this morning:

There is nothing so tender as love in full bloom–
no longer an enclosed bud with potential
but opened fully
petal unfolding upon petal
in caressing abandon.

Both Stone and Star

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Slowly the west reaches for clothes of new colors
which it passes to a row of ancient trees.
You look, and soon these two worlds both leave you
one part climbs toward heaven, one sinks to earth.

leaving you, not really belonging to either,
not so hopelessly dark as that house that is silent,
not so unswervingly given to the eternal as that thing
that turns to a star each night and climbs–

leaving you (it is impossible to untangle the threads)
your own life, timid and standing high and growing,
so that, sometimes blocked in, sometimes reaching out,
one moment your life is a stone in you, and the next, a star.
~Rainer Maria Rilke  “Sunset” (Trans. by Robert Bly) from The Soul is Here for Its Own Joy

 

 

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We are born with one hand still grasping tight to the star-studded heaven from which we came, still dusty from creation.  The other hand grabs hold of whatever it finds here on earth and won’t let go, whether the riches of relationship or the coldness of stone.

It can take decades, but our firm hold on heaven loosens so that we forget the dusty origins of our miraculous being.  We forget Who made us and why.

We can’t decide, tangled up in the threads of life:  dust of earth, stone heart?  Or dust of stars, child of Heaven?

We are daily reminded by the Light which clothes us in new colors – early in the morning as it crests the eastern hills and late as it descends in the west.  Heaven still reaches down once again to grasp our hand, making sure we know the way home.

 

 

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A Cloudy Greeting

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To make myself understood and to diminish the distance between us, I called out:
“I am an evening cloud too.”
They stopped still, evidently taking a good look at me.
Then they stretched towards me their fine, transparent, rosy wings.
That is how evening clouds greet each other.
They had recognized me.
~Rainer Maria Rilke from Stories of God

 

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From this hill, we can see for miles.  At certain times of morning and evening, it can feel as if we are aloft, closer up to the clouds, seeing the terrain from their vantage point.  There are the snow-covered peaks to the east, the craggy Canadian coastal range to the north, the stretch of river valley to the north west, the Salish Sea to the west and the forest to the south.

Surrounding us is the farmland and the good people who feed this community: the expanse of dairy land and its vast pastures, the corn fields, berry rows and potato mounds, acres of orchard espaliers and local farm-to-market and CSA growers.

The ever-moving, ever-changing immensity of the clouds covers us all.  As those clouds touch, embrace, release, mold and transform, they show us how connection with others is done.  As we county folk pass on the roads during an evening walk, as we are running late to town jobs, as we meet in the store or at church or community events, we too should touch and greet one another, nod and encourage, acknowledge the shared light that comes from beyond us that restores and transforms us.

Most of all, like the clouds, we are too often full to brimming, a shedding of shared tears at how easily this land can be taken away — whether remembering the sad history of people group domination and removal from their ancestral homes, or the ravages of hurricane or flood or volcano, the effects of drought and wildfire, of blight or sickness, or the over-regulation of government ensuring no farmer can afford to continue to do what they know best to preserve the land, the habitat, their animals and their crops.

We weep in recognition, like these clouds, to make ourselves understood and to diminish the distance between us.

 

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What Remains of My Day

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What is pertinent is the calmness of beauty, its sense of restraint. It is as though the land knows of its own beauty, its own greatness, and feels no need to shout it…

For a great many people, the evening is the most enjoyable part of the day. Perhaps, then, there is something to his advice that I should cease looking back so much, that I should adopt a more positive outlook and try to make the best of what remains of my day.

After all, what can we ever gain in forever looking back and blaming ourselves if our lives have not turned out quite as we might have wished?
~Kazuo Ishiguro from The Remains of the Day

 

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To make myself understood and to diminish the distance between us, I called out:
“I am an evening cloud too.”
They stopped still, evidently taking a good look at me.
Then they stretched towards me their fine, transparent, rosy wings.
That is how evening clouds greet each other.
They had recognized me.
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Stories of God

 

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During the quiet moments in the evening after we ascend the hill to watch the sun descend the sky, we see clouds move and change in the diminishing light.  They’re unable to remain the same as they are pushed across the horizon, constantly reinvented and renewed, adopting new shapes, new colors, new juxtapositions.

Even when I believe things will never change, they will,  and I will.  What is left of the remains of the day may be the best yet.

If I stop, watch and listen, I’ll soon hear that greeting of recognition.

 

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In the Dark, Reconciled

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I am the rest between two notes,
which are somehow always in discord
because Death’s note wants to climb over—
but in the dark interval, reconciled,
they stay there trembling.
And the song goes on, beautiful.
~Rainer Maria Rilke from “My Life is Not This Steeply Sloping Hour”

 

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On Sunday evenings I often feel I’m the spot in the middle between discordant notes. There is on one side of me the pressure of catch-up from what was left undone through a too-brief weekend and on the other side is the anticipated demand of the coming week. As I prepare to sleep at the end of a Sabbath day, I feel uneasily in dead center, immobilized by the unknown ahead and the known behind.

This moment of rest in the present, between the trembling past and uncertain future, is my moment of reconciliation: my Sabbath extended.

This evening, I will allow myself a steeply sloping hour of silence and reflection before I surge ahead into the week, knowing that on my journey I’ll inevitably hit wrong notes, yet beautiful nevertheless.

Even the least harmonious notes resolve within the next chord. I will move from the rest of my Sabbath back into the rhythm of my life.

Trembling, still trembling, always trembling at what is to come.

 

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photo by Josh Scholten

 

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A Simple Welcome

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He saw clearly how plain and simple – how narrow, even – it all was;
but clearly, too, how much it all meant to him,
and the special value of some such anchorage in one’s existence.
He did not at all want to abandon the new life and its splendid spaces, 
to turn his back on sun and air and all they offered him 
and creep home and stay there; 
the upper world was all too strong, 
it called to him still, even down there, 
and he knew he must return to the larger stage. 
But it was good to think he had this to come back to, 
this place which was all his own, 
these things which were so glad to see him again 
and could always be counted upon for the same simple welcome.
~Kenneth Grahame, from Wind in the Willows (about the Mole and his home at Mole End)

 

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If your everyday life seems poor to you, do not accuse it; accuse yourself, tell yourself you are not poet enough to summon up its riches; since for the creator there is no poverty and no poor or unimportant place.
― Rainer Maria Rilke

 

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As a child, I would sometimes spend long rainy afternoons languishing on the couch at home, complaining to my mother how boring my life was.  Her typical response was to remind me my boredom said more about me than about life – I became the accused, rather than the accuser,  failing to summon up life’s riches.  Thus convicted, my sentence followed:  she would promptly give me chores to do.   I learned not to voice my complaints about life because it always meant work.

Some things haven’t changed, even fifty five years later.  Whenever I am tempted to feel pitiful or bored, accusing my life of being poor or unfair, I need to remember what that says about me.  There is a whole world out there to explore, plenty of work needing doing and always a welcome home when I return.

If I’m not poet enough to celebrate the gilded edge of the plain and simple, if I’m not poet enough to articulate beauty even in the sharp thorns of life, if I’m not poet enough to recognize the Creator’s brilliance in every molecule, then it is my poverty I’m accusing, not his.

Back to work then.  There is a life to be lived, a world to experience and words to be written.

And it is good to think we have all this to come back to, this place which is all our own.

 

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photo by Nate Gibson

 

 

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A Stretching Light

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Did you too see it, drifting, all night, on the black river?
Did you see it in the morning, rising into the silvery air –
An armful of white blossoms,
A perfect commotion of silk and linen as it leaned
into the bondage of its wings; a snowbank, a bank of lilies,
Biting the air with its black beak?
Did you hear it, fluting and whistling
A shrill dark music – like the rain pelting the trees – like a waterfall
Knifing down the black ledges?
And did you see it, finally, just under the clouds –
A white cross Streaming across the sky, its feet
Like black leaves, its wings Like the stretching light of the river?
And did you feel it, in your heart, how it pertained to everything?
And have you too finally figured out what beauty is for?
And have you changed your life?
~Mary Oliver from “Swan”

 

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This laboring of ours with all that remains undone,
as if still bound to it,
is like the lumbering gait of the swan.

And then our dying—releasing ourselves
from the very ground on which we stood—
is like the way he hesitantly lowers himself

into the water. It gently receives him,
and, gladly yielding, flows back beneath him,
as wave follows wave,
while he, now wholly serene and sure,
with regal composure,
allows himself to glide.
~Rainer Maria Rilke, “The Swan”

 

And could it be that I too,
awkward and lumbering through my days
may glide and soar when afloat or aloft.Could it be there is beauty hidden away and within
until I change how I look at life,
how I move in the air that I’m given to breathe
and how I am stretched by the Light that illuminates me?
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But now they drift on the still water,   
Mysterious, beautiful;   
Among what rushes will they build,
By what lake’s edge or pool
Delight men’s eyes when I awake some day   
To find they have flown away?
~William Butler Years from “The Wild Swans at Coole”
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