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

Evening

image via Karen Harvey Cox

"The sky puts on the darkening blue coat


held for it by a row of ancient trees;


you watch: and the lands grow distant in your sight,


one journeying to heaven


and one that falls;


and leave you not at home in either one,


not quite so still and dark as the darkened houses,


not calling to eternity


with the passion of what becomes a star each night,


and rises; and leave you (inexpressibly to unravel)your life,


with its immensity and fear,


so that,


now bounded,


now immeasurable,


it is alternately stone in you and star."


-Rainer Maria Rilke", Evening

I Flow, I am

"Quiet friend who has come so far,

feel how your breathing makes more space around you.

Let this darkness be a bell tower and you the bell.

As you ring, what batters you becomes your strength.

Move back and forth into the change.

What is it like, such intensity of pain?

If the drink is bitter, turn yourself to wine.

In this uncontainable night,

be the mystery at the crossroads of your senses,

the meaning discovered there.

And if the world has ceased to hear you,

say to the silent earth: I flow.

To the rushing water, speak: I am."

-Rainer Maria Rilke,Sonnets to Orpheus, Part Two, Sonnet XXIX

A Way To The Future

"Live not in dreams,

but in contemplation of a reality that is perhaps the future." - Rainer Maria Rilke