~My Looking Ripens Things

Gold Creek Pond, Snoqualmie Pass, WA

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~The Mystery of Life Being Lived

Green Lake, British Columbia, Canada

And yet, though we strain against the deadening grip

of daily necessity,

I sense there is this mystery:

All life is being lived.

Who is living it, then?

Is it the things themselves,

or something waiting inside them,

like an unplayed melody in a flute?

Is it the winds blowing over the waters?

Is it the branches that signal to each other?

Is it flowers

interweaving their fragrances,

or streets, as they wind through time?

Is it the animals, warmly moving,

or the birds, that suddenly rise up?

Who lives it, then? God, are you the one

who is living life?

…

Rainer Maria Rilke

(found in Rilke’s Book of Hours)

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~Look Beyond the Reach of Knowing

Were it possible,

we might look beyond the reach of our knowing

and yet a bit further into the past

across the farmsteads of our ancestors.

Then perhaps we would endure our griefs

with even greater trust than our joys.

For they are the moments

when something new has entered into us,

something unfamiliar.

Our feelings become mute in timid shyness.

Everything within us steps back;

a silence ensues,

and the something new,

known to no one,

stands in the center

and is…

silent.

~Rainer Maria Rilke

(in Letters to a Young Poet)

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