I don’t think I can ever write great poetry. Rainer Maria Rilke had done it all for me.

Whom will you cry to, heart? More and more lonely,
your path struggles on through incomprehensible
mankind. All the more futile perhaps
for keeping to its direction,
keeping on toward the future,
toward what has been lost.

Once. You lamented? What was it? A fallen berry
of jubilation, unripe.
But now the whole tree of my jubilation
is breaking, in the storm it is breaking, my slow
tree of joy.
Loveliest in my invisible
landscape, you that made me more known
to the invisible angels.

-Lament
translated by Stephen Mitchell

All this stood upon her and was the world
and stood upon her with all its fear and grace
as trees stand, growing straight up, imageless
yet wholly image, like the Ark of God,
and solemn, as if imposed upon a race.

As she endured it all: bore up under
the swift-as-flight, the fleeting, the far-gone,
the inconceivably vast, the still-to-learn,
serenely as a woman carrying water
moves with a full jug. Till in the midst of play,
transfiguring and preparing for the future,
the first white veil descended, gliding softly

over her opened face, almost opaque there,
never to be lifted off again, and somehow
giving to all her questions just one answer:
In you, who were a child once – in you.

-The Grown Up
Rainer Maria Rilke (Trans. Stephen Mitchell)

Have you ever felt like the weight of the world is on your shoulders? It’s not a nice feeling. One, it’s heavy. Two, it’s sad. Three, it’s useless. Because feeling it won’t make the problems go away. I’ve had my ample share of burden that comes with the idea of being a grown up. It makes me hyperventilate at times and the fact that it scares me when it happens gives me hope. It means I still value my existence despite the seemingly never-ending hurdles.

I do not mean to spread gloom and doom; instead, this is my way of telling myself “Get over it!” Because everyone else in the world is busy minding their own hurdles. Everybody goes through their own hard patches, and this is not a contest of who is more miserable. It’s just life.

Self-motivating much? Well, I’ve learned that when you’re a grown up, you pick yourself up when you fall down. Though it would be nice to have someone to scoop you up and take you to a safe place, such things do not happen always. Most of the time, we are alone. And I don’t fear that anymore. It pains me, but it’s OK. Because I’d rather face my dramas than regress back to being a child. Well, when it all gets too much, I go to that place just for a bit – like by crying inconsolably or by hiding inside an empty room and letting out a guttural scream. The last one works like a charm.

as if the river shores were opening out.

It seems that things are more like me now,

That I can see farther into paintings.

I feel closer to what language can’t reach.

With my senses, as with birds, I climb

into the windy heaven, out of the oak,

in the ponds broken off from the sky

my falling sinks, as if standing on fishes.

Moving Forward

-Rainer Maria Rilke -

Translated by Robert Bly

I bought a little black book to write on. It hasn’t been touched yet. Funny how I can keep on doing this but can’t make myself write down my thoughts for me. To tell you the truth, it’s too damn scary. What would I say, “Hi self, you can’t make up stories here; you can’t fool me.”

The problem with standing on fishes, I think, is that they are too slippery.

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is shadow under this red rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

Excerpt from The Wasteland, T.S. Elliot

I’ve been thinking about what people fear the most - isolation, desolation, death. I’ve seen it in books, in the movies, in TV. When they say “You are not alone,” I get it. When they say “Everyone is alone,” I get it, too. I think neither statement is wrong. The trick could be not to think about it. Or at least not to think about it too much and instead try to find the balance where you can exist with knowing that you’ll go through the full spectrum, in cycles even, as you continue on.

I remember when I was just starting to work, I can never eat at the cafeteria alone. Finding a group to go with is more of a survival measure than anything else. Of course that changed through time. I didn’t have a cellular phone then to keep tabs on my loved ones. Now, people even install cell phone amplifiers in their vehicles for fear of missing an important call. But this isn’t about technology. This is about fighting the fear of being cut off. Rilke once said that because solitude is heavy and difficult to bear, sometimes people “would gladly exchange it for any kind of sociability, however trivial or cheap, for the tiniest outward agreement with the first person who comes along, the most unworthy.” I guess that’s true. I am yet to meet someone who can keep me company in silence and be right about it.

Whoever has no house now, will never have one.
Whoever is alone will stay alone,
will sit, read, write long letters through the evening,
and wander on the boulevards, up and down,
restlessly, while the dry leaves are blowing

-Excerpt from Autumn Day
From The Book of Pictures
Rainer Maria Rilke

Why do I like reading your poetry so much? Dang.

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www.youtube.com/watch?v=WG7Zwju20_U

If you are the dreamer, I am what you dream.
But when you want to wake, I am your wish,
and I grow strong with all magnificence
and turn myself into a star’s vast silence
above the strange and distant city, Time.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Translated from the German text by Stephen Mitchell

We are not unified. We have no instincts

like those of migratory birds. Useless, and late,

we force ourselves, suddenly, onto the wind,

and fall down to an indifferent lake.

We realise flowering and fading together.

And somewhere lions still roam. Never knowing,

as long as they have their splendour, of any weakness.

From the Fourth Elegy
Duino Elegies (Rainer Maria Rilke)
Translation by A.S. Kline

Ranier Maria Rilke

From The Book of Hours

Have you ever tried to enter the long black branches
of other lives –
tried to imagine what the crisp fringes, full of honey,
hanging
from the branches of the young locust trees, in early morning,
feel like?

Do you think this world was only an entertainment for you?

Never to enter the sea and notice how the water divides
with perfect courtesy, to let you in!
Never to lie down on the grass, as though you were the grass!
Never to leap to the air as you open your wings over
the dark acorn of your heart!

No wonder we hear, in your mournful voice, the complaint
that something is missing from your life!

Who can open the door who does not reach for the latch?
Who can travel the miles who does not put one foot
in front of the other, all attentive to what presents itself
continually?
Who will behold the inner chamber who has not observed
with admiration, even with rapture, the outer stone?

Well, there is time left –
fields everywhere invite you into them.

And who will care, who will chide you if you wander away
from wherever you are, to look for your soul?

Quickly, then, get up, put on your coat, leave your desk!

To put one’s foot into the door of the grass, which is
the mystery, which is death as well as life, and
not be afraid!

To set one’s foot in the door of death, and be overcome
with amazement!

To sit down in front of the weeds, and imagine
god the ten-fingered, sailing out of his house of straw,
nodding this way and that way, to the flowers of the
present hour,
to the song falling out of the mockingbird’s pink mouth,
to the tippets of the honeysuckle, that have opened
in the night

To sit down, like a weed among weeds, and rustle in the wind!

Listen, are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life?

While the soul, after all, is only a window,
and the opening of the window no more difficult
than the wakening from a little sleep.

Only last week I went out among the thorns and said
to the wild roses:
deny me not,
but suffer my devotion.
Then, all afternoon, I sat among them. Maybe

I even heard a curl or tow of music, damp and rouge red,
hurrying from their stubby buds, from their delicate watery bodies.

For how long will you continue to listen to those dark shouters,
caution and prudence?
Fall in! Fall in!

A woman standing in the weeds.
A small boat flounders in the deep waves, and what’s coming next
is coming with its own heave and grace.

Meanwhile, once in a while, I have chanced, among the quick things,
upon the immutable.
What more could one ask?
And I would touch the faces of the daises,
and I would bow down
to think about it.

That was then, which hasn’t ended yet.
Now the sun begins to swing down. Under the peach-light,
I cross the fields and the dunes, I follow the ocean’s edge.
I climb, I backtrack.
I float.
I ramble my way home.

(Mary Oliver, West Wind: Poems and Prose Poems)