When was the last time you felt your body as Eros incarnate, as though the fires of creation itself were leaping out of it and could not be contained? When did you last feel your existence entire as a divine fragment, filled with longing for something infinite, overflowing with an incomprehensible madness and an exquisite harmony? When was it you last felt all the stars in the universe pulsing in your single beat of heart, pulsing and pulsing with an irremediable fire that wants to create over and over the entire universe in the image of your love? A thousand lightning churning together through your body, yet deeply imbued with the stillness of dawn?—Ah listen, just wait and listen, the whole of life is within you, it was for you that the universe was created, it was to embrace you that love was born. It is time to open you heart and feel, and let go of the constraints of your mind. Feel, even if it tears you apart; feel this boundless joy that has been your fate since the beginning of time.
Tag: creation
For your sake poets sequester themselves, Rainer Maria Rilke
“For your sake poets sequester themselves,
gather images to churn the mind,
journey forth, ripening with metaphor,
and all their lives they are so alone…
And painters paint their pictures only
that the world, so transient as you made it,
can be given back to you,
to last forever.
All becomes eternal. See: In the Mona Lisa
some woman has long since ripened like wine,
and the enduring feminine is held there
through all the ages.
Those who create are like you.
They long for the eternal.
They say, Stone, be forever!
And that means: be yours.
And lovers also gather your inheritance.
They are the poets of one brief hour.
They kiss an expressionless mouth into a smile
as if creating it anew, more beautiful.
Awakening desire, they make a place
where pain can enter;
that’s how growing happens.
They bring suffering along with their laughter,
and longings that had slept and now awaken
to weep in a stranger’s arms.
They let the riddles pile up and then they die
the way animals die, without making sense of it.
But maybe in those who come after,
their green life will ripen;
it’s then that you will inherit the love
to which they gave themselves so blindly, as in a sleep.
Thus the overflow from things
pours into you.
Just as a fountain’s higher basins
spill down like strands of loosened hair
into the lowest vessel,
so streams the fullness into you,
when things and thoughts cannot contain it.”
— Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy
Rooted in Love 