We pass away, till at last,
our passing is so immense
that you arise: beautiful moment,
in all your suddenness,
arising in love, or enchanted
in the contraction of work.
To you I belong, however time may
wear me away. From you to you
I go commanded. In between
the garland is hanging in chance; but if you
take it up and up and up: look:
all becomes festival!
Rainer Maria Rilke
I read this poem today in my collection of Rilke poetry, and I'm unsure if it's a picture of God or nature, or one within the other, maybe just "the way". The way all things have precisely one way of fitting together perfectly, looking so different from each angle at which they are seen. I'm seeing for perhaps the very first time that the garland is indeed hanging in chance.
I met an aspiring ultra-marathoner, a vitamin sales woman/closet super environmentalist, and a quintessential starving artist today. These people shared nearly no physical attributes, they didn't say the same things to me, they weren't headed for similar homes at the day's end or similar places to live or die or anything in between after today. But I was told by the human meteor who shook the foundation of my Earth, if only briefly, that the world around you, or your perception of it at least, is just a reflection of yourself. And I may have shattered my own skepticism of that today.
"You will love again the stranger who was your self."
Walcott
^photo by superpipo2010
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