wholly into ourselves

Nature, and the things we live with and use, 
precede us and come after us. But they are, 
so long as we are here, our possession and our friendship.
 They know us with our needs and our pleasures,
 as they did those of our ancestors, 
whose trusted companions they were.

So it follows that all that is here is not to be despised 
and put down, but, precisely because it did precede us, 
to be taken by us with the innermost understanding 
that these appearances and things must be seen and transformed.

Transformed? Yes. For our task is to take this earth so deeply 
and wholly into ourselves that it will resurrect within our being. 
We are bees of the invisible. Passionately we plunder the honey of the visible
 in order to gather it in the great golden hive of the invisible.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

from a letter to Witold Hulewicz

November 13, 1925

the spirit that makes connections

Bless the spirit that makes connections,
for truly we live in what we imagine.
Clocks move along side our real life
with steps that are ever the same.

Though we do not know our exact location,
we are held in place by what links us.
Across trackless distances
antennas sense each other.

Pure attention, the essence of the powers!
Distracted by each day's doing,
how can we hear the signals?

Even as the farmer labors
there where the seed turns into summer,
it is not his work. It is Earth who gives.




~ Rainer Maria Rilke
from Sonnets to Orpheus, Part One, XII
Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy version

art by Christi Belcourt

 

everything taken away

.

It seems to me that almost all our sadnesses are moments of tension, 

which we feel as paralysis because we no longer hear our astonished emotions living. 

Because we are alone with the unfamiliar presence that has entered us; 

because everything we trust and are used to is for a moment taken away from us;

 because we stand in the midst of a transition where we cannot remain standing.

 That is why the sadness passes: the new presence inside us,

 the presence that has been added, has entered our heart,

 has gone into its innermost chamber and is no longer even there,

 is already in our bloodstream.

 And we don’t know what it was. We could easily be made to believe

 that nothing happened, and yet we have changed, 

as a house that a guest has entered changes. 

We can’t say who has come, perhaps we will never know, 

but many signs indicate that the future enters us in this way 

in order to be transformed in us, long before it happens.

 And that is why it is so important to be solitary and attentive when one is sad:

 because the seemingly uneventful and motionless moment 

when our future steps into us is so much closer to life

 than that other loud and accidental point of time

when it happens to us as if from outside. 

The quieter we are, the more patient and open we are in our sadnesses, 

the more deeply and serenely the new presence can enter us, 

and the more we can make it our own, the more it becomes our fate;

 and later on, when it “happens” (that is, steps forth out of us to other people),

 we will feel related and close to it in our innermost being.

 And that is necessary. It is necessary – and toward this point our development

 will move, little by little – that nothing alien happen to us, 

but only what has long been our own. People have already had to rethink

 so many concepts of motion; and they will also gradually come to realize

 that what we call fate does not come into us from the outside, 

but emerges from us. 

It is only because so many people have not absorbed and transformed 

their fates while they were living in them that they have not realized

what was emerging from them; it was so alien to them that, 

in their confusion and fear, they thought it must have entered them 

at the very moment they became aware of it, for they swore they had never

 before found anything like that inside them. just as people for a long time

 had a wrong idea about the sun’s motion, they are even now wrong

 about the motion of what is to come. The future stands still,

 dear Mr. Kappus, but we move in infinite space.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

from Letters to a Young Poet 

The Eighth Letter

photo by Eliot Porter

our eyes are turned backward

With all its eyes the natural world looks out

into the Open.  Only our eyes are turned

backward, and surround plant, animal, child

like traps, as they emerge into their freedom.

We know what is really out there only from 

the animal's gaze;  for we take the very young

child and force it around, so that it sees

objects - not the Open, which is so

deep in animals' faces.  Free from death.

We, only, can see death; the free animal

has its decline in back of it, forever,

and God in front, and when it moves, it moves

already in eternity, like a fountain.

Never, not for a single day, do we have

before us that pure space into which flowers

endlessly open.  Always there is World

and never Nowhere without the No: that pure

unseparated element which one breathes

without desire and endlessly knows.  A child

may wander there for hours, through the timeless

stillness, may get lost in it and be 

shaken back.  Or someone dies and is it.

For, nearing death, one doesn't see death; but stares

beyond, perhaps with an animal's vast gaze.

Lovers, if the beloved were not there

blocking the view, are close to it, and marvel...

As if by some mistake, it opens for them

behind each other... But neither can move past

the other, and it changes back to World.

Forever turned toward objects, we see in them

the mere reflection of the realm of freedom,

which we have dimmed.  Or when some animal

mutely, serenely, looks us through and through.

That is what fate means: to be opposite,

to be opposite and nothing else, forever.

If the animal moving toward us so securely
in a different direction had our kind of 
consciousness -, it would wrench us around and drag us
along its path.  But it feels its life as boundless,
unfathomable, and without regard
to its own condition: pure, like its outward gaze.
And where we see the future, it sees all time
and itself within all time, forever healed.

Yet in the alert, warm animal there lies
the pain and burden of an enormous sadness.
For it too feels the presence of what often 
overwhelms us: a memory, as if 
the element we keep pressing toward was once
more intimate, more true, and our communion
infinitely tender.  Here all is distance;
there it was breath.  After that first home,
the second seems ambiguous and drafty.

Oh bliss of the tiny creature which remains
forever inside the womb that was its shelter;
joy of the gnat which, still within, leaps up
even at its marriage: for everything is womb.
And look at the half-assurance of the bird,
which knows both inner and outer, from its source,
as if it were the soul of an Etruscan,
flown out of a dead man received inside a space,
but with his reclining image as the lid.
And how bewildered is any womb-born creature
that has to fly.  As if terrified and fleeing
from itself, it zigzags through the air, the way 
a crack runs through a teacup.  So the bat
quivers across the porcelain of evening.

And we: spectators, always, everywhere,
turned toward the world of objects, never outward.
It fills us.  We arrange it.  It breaks down.
We rearrange it, then break down ourselves.
Who has twisted us around like this , so that 
no matter what we do, we are in the posture
of someone going away?  Just as, upon
the farthest hill, which shows him his whole valley
one last time, he turns, stops, lingers -,
so we live here, forever taking leave.




~ Rainer Maria Rilke

The Eighth Elegy 
from Duino Elegies
photo by shreve stockton

allow the unfolding from within

Allow your judgments their own undisturbed development, 

which, like any unfolding, must come from within 

and can by nothing be forced or hastened. 

 

Everything is gestation and then birth. 

 

To allow each impression and each embryo of a feeling

 to complete itself in the dark, in the unsayable, the not-knowing,

 beyond the reach of one's own understanding, 

and humbly and patiently to await the dawning of a new clarity: 

that alone is the way of the artist -

in understanding as in creating.

 

...

Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart

and try to love the questions themselves...

Do not now seek the answers, 

which cannot be given to you because you will not be able to live them.

And the point is, to live everything.

Live the questions now.

Perhaps you will then gradually,

without noticing it,

live along some distant day into the answer.

 

 

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

 from Letters to a Young Poet, April 23, 1903

the one guest

 

She who reconciles the ill-matched threads

of her life, and weaves them gratefully

into a single cloth -

it's she who drives the loudmouths from the hall

and clears it for a different celebration

where the one guest is you.

In the softness of evening

it's you she receives.

You are the partner of her loneliness.

the unspeaking center of her monologues.

With each disclosure you encompass more

and she stretches beyond what limits her,

to hold you.

~ Rilke

from Rilke's Book of Hours

Love Poems to God

simply

 

I'm too alone in the world, yet not alone enough

to make each hour holy

I'm too small in the world, yet not small enough

to be simply in your presence, like a thing-

just as it is.

I want to know my own will

 and to move with it.

And I want, in the hushed moments

when the nameless draws near,

to be among the wise ones-

or alone.

I want to mirror your immensity.

I want never to be too weak or too old

to bear the heavy, lurching image of you.

I want to unfold.

Let no place in me hold itself closed,

for where I am closed, I am false.

I want to stay clear in your sight.

~ Rilke's Book of Hours

The Book of Monastic Life

the way it is with children

.

I believe in all that has never yet been spoken.

I want to free what waits within me

so that what no one has dared to wish for

.

may for once spring clear

without my contriving.

.

If this is arrogant, God, forgive me,

but this is what I need to say.

May what I do flow from me like a river,

no forcing and no holding back,

the way it is with children.

.

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

from Rilke's Book of Hours

translation by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy

.

how surely gravity's law (II, 16)

How surely gravity's law,

strong as an ocean current,

takes hold of even the strongest thing

and pulls it toward the heart of the world.

Each thing -

each stone, blossom, child -

is held in place.

Only we, in our arrogance,

push out beyond what we belong to

for some empty freedom.

If we surrendered

to earth's intelligence

we could rise up rooted, like trees.

Instead we entangle ourselves

in knots of our own making

and struggle, lonely and confused.

So, like children, we begin again

to learn from the things,

because they are in God's heart;

they have never left him.

This is what the things can teach us:

to fall,

patiently to trust our heaviness.

Even a bird has to do that

before he can fly.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

from Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God

translated by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy

.

the simplicity

.

If you hold to Nature, to the simplicity that is in her, 

to the small detail that scarcely one man sees, 

which can so unexpectedly grow into something great and boundless; 

if you have this love for insignificant things and seek, simply as one who serves, 

to win the confidence of what seems to be poor: 

then everything will become easier for you, 

more coherent and somehow more conciliatory,

 not perhaps in the understanding, which lags wondering behind, 

but in your innermost consciousness, 

wakefulness and knowing.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke 

from Letters to a Young Poet

as we truly are

We are not poor. We are just without riches,

we who have no will, no world:

marked with the marks of the latest anxiety,

disfigured, stripped of leaves.

Around us swirls the dust of the cities, 

the garbage clings to us.

We are shunned as if contaminated,

thrown away like broken pots, like bones,

like last year's calendar.

And yet if our Earth needed to

she could weave us together like roses

and make of us a garland.

For each being is cleaner than washed stones

and endlessly yours, and like an animal

who knows already in its first blind moments

its need for one thing only -

to let ourselves be poor like that - as we truly are.

 

 

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

III.16, The Book of Poverty and Death

 

 

 

the intimate space

.

 

 

 

What birds plunge through is not the intimate space

in which you see all forms intensified.

(Out in the Open, you would be denied

your self, would disappear into that vastness.)

 

Space reaches from us and construes the world:

to know a tree, in its true element,

throw inner space around it, from that pure

abundance in you.  Surround it with restraint.

It has no limits.  Not till it is held

in your renouncing is it truly there.

 

 

 

 

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

from Uncollected Poems

.

 

 

 

in our sadnesses

.

It seems to me that almost all our sadnesses are moments of tension, 

which we feel as paralysis because we no longer hear our astonished emotions living.

 Because we are alone with the unfamiliar presence that has entered us; 

because everything we trust and are used to is for a moment taken away

 from us; because we stand in the midst of a transition 

where we cannot remain standing. 

 
That is why the sadness passes: the new presence inside us,

 the presence that has been added, has entered our heart,

 has gone into its innermost chamber and is no longer even there, – 

is already in our bloodstream. And we don’t know what it was. 

We could easily be made to believe that nothing happened, 

and yet we have changed, as a house that a guest has entered changes. 

We can’t say who has come, perhaps we will never know, 

but many signs indicate that the future enters us in this way

 in order to be transformed in us, long before it happens. 

 
And that is why it is so important to be solitary and attentive when one is sad:

 because the seemingly uneventful and motionless moment 

when our future steps into us is so much closer to life

 than that other loud and accidental point of time when it happens to us

 as if from outside. The quieter we are, the more patient and open 

we are in our sadnesses, the more deeply and serenely the new presence

 can enter us, and the more we can make it our own, 

the more it becomes our fate.

 

 

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

.

the man watching

I can tell by the way the trees beat, after
so many dull days, on my worried windowpanes
that a storm is coming,
and I hear the far-off fields say things
I can’t bear without a friend,
I can’t love without a sister

The storm, the shifter of shapes, drives on
across the woods and across time,
and the world looks as if it had no age:
the landscape like a line in the psalm book,
is seriousness and weight and eternity.

What we choose to fight is so tiny!
What fights us is so great!
If only we would let ourselves be dominated
as things do by some immense storm,
we would become strong too, and not need names.

When we win it’s with small things,
and the triumph itself makes us small.
What is extraordinary and eternal
does not want to be bent by us.
I mean the Angel who appeared
to the wrestlers of the Old Testament:
when the wrestler’s sinews
grew long like metal strings,
he felt them under his fingers
like chords of deep music.

Whoever was beaten by this Angel
(who often simply declined the fight)
went away proud and strengthened
and great from that harsh hand,
that kneaded him as if to change his shape.
Winning does not tempt that man.
This is how he grows: by being defeated, decisively,
by constantly greater beings.

 

 

 

~ Rainer Maria Rilke 

translation by Robert Bly

between the hammers our heart endures

 

 

 

 

 

 Happy are those who know
behind all words, the Unsayable stands,
and from that source, the Infinite
crosses over to gladness, and us.

Free of those bridges we raise
with constructed distinctions;
so that always, in each separate joy,
we gaze at the single, wholly mutual core.

...

But because truly being here is so much; because everything here

apparently needs us, this fleeting world, which in some strange way

keeps calling to us. Us, the most fleeting of all.

Once for each thing. Just once; no more. And we too,

just once. And never again. But to have been

this once, completely, even if only once:

to have been one with the earth, seems beyond undoing.

 

 ...

 

Here is the time for the say-able, here is its homeland.

Speak and bear witness. More than ever

the Things that we might experience are vanishing, for

what crowds them out and replaces them is an imageless act.

An act under a shell, which easily cracks open as soon as

the business inside outgrows it and seeks new limits.

Between the hammers our heart

endures, just as the tongue does

between the teeth and, despite that,

still is able to praise.

 

 

 

 

 

 ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

art by Keith Hennig

 

the winged energy of delight

.

 

As once the winged energy of delight

carried you over childhood's dark abysses,

now beyond your own life build the great

arch of unimagined bridges.

 

Wonders happen if we can succeed

in passing through the harshest danger;

but only in a bright and purely granted

achievement can we realize the wonder.

 

To work with Things in the indescribable

relationship is not too hard for us;

the pattern grows more intricate and subtle,

and being swept along is not enough.

 

Take your practiced powers and stretch them out

until they span the chasm between two

contradictions... For the god

wants to know himself in you.

 

 

 

 

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

from uncollected poems

departure

To go forth now

from all the entanglement

that is ours and yet not ours,

that, like the water in an old well,

reflects us in fragments, distorts what we are.

 

From all that clings like burrs and brambles—

to go forth

and see for once, close up, afresh,

what we had ceased to see—

so familiar it had become.

 

To glimpse how vast and how impersonal

is the suffering that filled your childhood.

Yes, to go forth, hand pulling away from hand.

 

Go forth to what? To uncertainty,

to a country with no connections to us

and indifferent to the dramas of our life.

 

What drives you to go forth? Impatience, instinct,

a dark need, the incapacity to understand.

 

To bow to all this.

To let go—

even if you have to die alone.

Is this the start of a new life?

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

excerpt from  The Prodigal Son, 

The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

art by Ruth Norman

you dark net threading through us

I love you, gentlest of Ways,

who ripened us as we wrestled with you.

You, the great homesickness we could never shake off,

you, the forest that always surrounded us,

you, the song we sang in every silence,

you dark net threading through us,

You began yourself so greatly

on that day when you began us -

and we have so ripened in your sunlight,

spreading far and firmly planted -

that now in all people, angels, madonnas,

you can decide: the work is done.

Let your hand rest on the rim of Heaven now

and mutely bear the darkness we bring over you.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

.

the rest between two notes

My life is not this steeply sloping hour,
in which you see me hurrying.

Much stands behind me: I stand before it like a tree:
I am only one of my many mouths
and at that, the one that will be still the soonest.

I am the rest between two notes,
which are somehow always in discord
because deaths note wants to climb over-
but in the dark interval, reconciled,

They stay here trembling.
And the song goes on, beautiful.



~ Rainer Maria Rilke

you will become

 

 

 

 

You too will find your strength.

We who must live in this time

cannot imagine how strong you will become -

how strange, how surprising,

yet familiar as yesterday.

 

We will sense you

like a fragrance from a nearby garden

and watch you move through our days

like a shaft of sunlight in a sickroom.

 

We will not be herded into churches,

for you are not made by the crowd,

you who meet us in our solitude.

 

We are cradled close in you hands -

and lavishly flung forth.

 

 

 

 

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

from The Book of Pilgrimage, II,26