In Wanting Change

"Want the change. Be inspired by the flame

where everything shines as it disappears.

The artist, when sketching, loves nothing so much

as the curve of the body as it turns away.

What locks itself in sameness has congealed.

Is it safer to be gray and numb?

What turns hard becomes rigid

and is easily shattered.

"Pour yourself out like a fountain.

Flow into the knowledge that what you are seeking

finishes often at the start,

and, with ending, begins.

Every happiness is the child of a separation

it did not think it could survive.

And Daphne,

becoming a laurel,

dares you to become the wind."

-Rainer Maria Rilke, In Praise of Mortality
The Sonnets to Orpheus, Part Two, XII