Rainer Maria Rilke
Liberation & Love
November 7, 2021If liberation is collective, we need way more work…and awareness.
Image: The Camino de Santiago de Compostela…along the Way.
Those of us who live in privilege due to wealth or ethnicity may not understand interdependence with the collective, with all species, and other. Listen.
Compassion refers to the arising in the heart of the desire to relieve the suffering of all beings. […] It arises from a desire created by the collective suffering of all beings.
-Ram Dass
Where we have withheld love, we have had to learn to extend love. But if this doesn’t not carry over into the rest of our relationships, nothing of any lasting value will have been gained.
-Rolf Gates
Should you be mistaken, then slowly and with time the natural growth of your inner life will bring you to fuller awareness.
-Rilke
This call to love our neighbor is the foundation for reestablishing and reclaiming the common good, which has fallen into cultural and political—and even religious—neglect.
-Jim Wallis
The zeitgeist of this moment is not so much about the brilliance of any one individual, though certainly our times do not lack for geniuses. It’s more about the strength and power of the group and the genius that emerges from our collective wisdom. This isn’t an age of the soloist but an age of the choir. Soloists have their part to play, yes, but the song belongs to the choir itself.
And we will endure, rise up and triumph too. Somehow we will find a way to make the world a better place. We will repair the earth and learn how to tend to it lovingly. We will put down our arms and find a way to make peace. We will heal ourselves, and heal the earth, and heal each other. We will learn how to live in another kind of way.
-Marianne Williamson
May the Beloved use me today.
Love will save the world, but only if we express it. May everything I do today be an expression of God‘s love.
May I be a channel for love today, co-creating with God a more perfect world. With every thought of love, I create a miracle. And every time I withhold love, I deflect one. Today may I only love.
Dear God,
Use my hands and feet,
My words and actions today.
Use who I am and what I do
To help You heal the world.
Amen.
May our Beloved use me today.
Get after that light.
May 21, 2020
@courtwrites
‘I believe in all that has never yet been spoken.’ -Rilke
Rilke.
April 27, 2019
“Dear darkening ground,
you’ve endured so patiently the walls we built,
please give the cities one more hour
and the churches and cloisters two.
And those that labor — let their toils
still hold them for another five hours, or seven,
before that hour of inconceivable terror
when you take back your name/ from all things.
Just give me a little more time!
I just need a little more time.
Because I am going to love the things
as no one has thought to love them,
until they’re real and worthy of you.”
❧
The creative experience.
July 6, 2016
(Illustration by Julie Paschkis from ‘Pablo Neruda: Poet of the People.’)
Rainer Maria Rilke
We’re only here for a short while. And I think it’s such a lucky accident, having been born, that we’re almost obliged to pay attention. In some ways, this is getting far afield. I mean, we are — as far as we know — the only part of the universe that’s self-conscious. We could even be the universe’s form of consciousness. We might have come along so that the universe could look at itself. I don’t know that, but we’re made of the same stuff that stars are made of, or that floats around in space. But we’re combined in such a way that we can describe what it’s like to be alive, to be witnesses. Most of our experience is that of being a witness. We see and hear and smell other things. I think being alive is responding.
NPR
Elie Wiesel was called many things during his life. He liked to call himself simply a witness. And as a witness, he said, it was his duty to never let those who suffered be forgotten.
Jacob Needleman
American: guardian of the possibility of human beings to search for conscience.
Mary Oliver
Attention without feeling is only report.
Mark Strand
[When] you’re right in the work, you lose your sense of time, you’re completely enraptured, you’re completely caught up in what you’re doing, and you’re sort of swayed by the possibilities you see in this work. If that becomes too powerful, then you get up, because the excitement is too great. You can’t continue to work or continue to see the end of the work because you’re jumping ahead of yourself all the time. The idea is to be so… so saturated with it that there’s no future or past, it’s just an extended present in which you’re, uh, making meaning. And dismantling meaning, and remaking it. Without undue regard for the words you’re using. It’s meaning carried to a high order. It’s not just essential communication, daily communication; it’s a total communication. When you’re working on something and you’re working well, you have the feeling that there’s no other way of saying what you’re saying.
[…]
One of the amazing things about what I do is you don’t know when you’re going to be hit with an idea, you don’t know where it comes from. I think it has to do with language. Writers are people who have greater receptivity to language, and I think that they will see something in a phrase, or even in a word, that allows them to change it or improve what was there before. I have no idea where things come from. It’s a great mystery to me, but then so many things are. I don’t know why I’m me, I don’t know why I do the things I do. I don’t even know whether my writing is a way of figuring it out. I think that it’s inevitable, you learn more about yourself the more you write, but that’s not the purpose of writing. I don’t write to find out more about myself. I write because it amuses me.
[…]
I am always thinking in the back of my mind, there’s something always going on back there. I am always working, even if it’s sort of unconsciously, even though I’m carrying on conversations with people and doing other things, somewhere in the back of my mind I’m writing, mulling over. And another part of my mind is reviewing what I’ve done.
[…]
Keep your eyes and ears open, and your mouth shut. For as long as possible.
Virginia Woolf
Wave in the mind.
(Parts gratefully borrowed from Maria Papova.)