no life is single

 

 

When the garden of your unchosen lives has enough space to breathe beneath
 your chosen path, your life enjoys a vitality and sense of creative tension. 
 Rilke refers to this as "the repository of unlived things."

 

*

No one lives his life.

Disguised since childhood,

haphazardly assembled

from voices and fears and little pleasures,

we come of age as masks.

Our true face never speaks.

Somewhere there must be storehouses

where all these lives are laid away

like suits of armor or old carriages

or clothes hanging limply on the walls.

Maybe all paths lead there,

to the repository of unlived things.

excerpted from Rilke’s Book of Hours: Love Poems to God

*

 

You know that you have not compromised the immensity that you carry,
 and in which you participate.  You have not avoided the call of commitment; 
 yet you hold your loyalty to your chosen path in such a way as to be true
 to the blessings and dangers in life's passionate sacramentality. 

 No life is single. Around and beneath each life is the living presence
 of these adjacencies.... to keep the borders of choice porous demands 
critical vigilance and affective hospitality.  To live in such a way invites risk
 and engages complexity.   Yet the integrity of growth demands such courage
 and vulnerability from us; otherwise the tissues of our sensibility atrophy
 and we become trapped behind the same predictable mask of behavior. 

 

 

~ John O'Donohue

from Eternal Echoes

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