Tag Archives: Rainer Maria Rilke

Small Stone for Jan. 14, 2014

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badge-14-300x300Today’s passage from A Year with Rilke is dated Aug. 12, 1904, and comes from Letters to a Young Poet.

Here, he tells us that fate is not an external force, but something that comes from ourselves. He says just as we were wrong about the sun’s movement, we are also wrong about what is ahead.

Jan. 14, 2014

If fate lies
inside us,
what changes might we
still have power to make?

If we think differently now,
live differently, can we
slow or halt disease
our careless lives have brought?

Letters to a Young Poet, by Rainer Maria Rilke

Letters to a Young Poet, by Rainer Maria Rilke (Photo credit: elycefeliz)

 

–CAS

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Small Stone for Jan. 13, 2014

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badge-14-300x300The poem for Jan. 13 in A Year with Rilke is titled, “Be Ahead of All Parting”. Rilke here encourages treating a parting as if it had already taken place, and to return from this to connection.

Rainer Maria Rilke

When I decided to buy this book, I really was quite unfamiliar with Rilke’s work, and had no inkling of how closely it would correspond to the thoughts and fears that I’ve been trying to deal with for the last couple of winters. I am hoping, through writing down my responses to the daily readings, to work through my own confusion and fear to find a quiet place inside where I can enjoy life fully.  I have included a quote from the poem, the 3rd of 4 stanzas, as that is the essence, I think, of my own struggle.

Jan. 13, 2014

..Be. And know as well the need to NOT be:
let that ground of all that changes
bring you to completion now.  —Rainer Maria Rilke

Here is the difficult thing.
To know that death is coming,
to balance knowing with
living fully in the present.

An hourglass

An hourglass (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

To connect with now,
to leave the past behind.
To know that life is lived
only in the present, to enjoy
each moment that we are.

–CAS

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Small Stone for Jan. 12, 2014

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badge-14-300x300Today’s Rilke poem is called The Panther, a vivid picture of a caged animal where the world becomes smaller and smaller and the cat loses all sense of connection, but for a brief moment at the end, which then fades away.

I thought at first of writing about the zoo. I lived not far from one as a child, an old-style zoo before attempts were made to duplicate an animal’s natural environment. But it didn’t quite work for me today. Nor did a poem about my own cat. He is often the subject of my poems, but on a lighter note. And then it occurred to me that depression might be like a cage of sorts. That inspired this poem:

File:Animal artists at the Jardin des Plantes.jpgJan. 12, 2014 –CAS

When my mind is caught
in a cycle of worry

it is like Rilke’s caged panther,
thoughts move in circles,

tighter and tighter, where
nothing penetrates but fear.  

Rainer Maria Rilke

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Small Stone for Jan. 11, 2014

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badge-14-300x300Today in Rilke he notes that the sense of being “harmless in nature is lost to us”. That its quiet presence is “overwhelmed by our knowledge of the unspeakable human fate that, night and day, unfolds.” 

At first, I thought he was referring again to the inevitable end of our lives, but on looking up the date, Sept. 9, 1914, realized that it perhaps instead referred to the war. It had begun in July, and by Sept. 9, the German army was approaching Paris. In the following days, the Allies were successful in pushing back the German advance in the First Battle of the Marne. http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/365968/First-Battle-of-the-Marne

Jan. 11, 2014

No Mans Land, Flanders Field, France, 1919 (LOC)

Whether war or peace,
there is always human destruction
of the land. We drive nature,
its flora and fauna, to seek
always shrinking habitat,
then begin to look elsewhere
for new territory for ourselves.

Our mindset never forethought,
always after.

Managed Destruction

Managed Destruction (Photo credit: Harlz_)

–CAS

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