During times of division and stress, it's easy to lose perspective. We steep ourselves in the news and become more anxious or angry. We build up barricades of our beliefs, turned rock hard, and stand behind them, lobbing words and worse at each other.
So what do you do to pull yourself back into a quieter space of mind or to stay calm?
I've been reading daily from A Year with Rilke, bits of the poet's prose and poetry translated by Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows.
And I'd like to share today's fragment. It's from Sonnets to Orpheus I, 12, by Rainer Marie Rilke. (Apologies for the odd form but the software won't let me make spaces between the stanzas.)
What Links Us
Bless the spirit that makes connections,
for truly we live in what we imagine.
Clocks move alongside our real life
with steps that are ever the same.
Though we do not know our exact location,
we are held in place by what links us.
Across trackless distances
antennas sense each other.
Pure attention, the essence of the powers!
Distracted by each day's doing,
how can we hear the signals?
Even as the farmer labors
there where the seed turns into summer,
it is not his work. It is the Earth who gives.