On courage to enter the soul's depths: No. 9 in Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus

Photo by Maksym Kaharlytskyi on Unsplash

Most of us avoid the descent into our inner lives because we fear we'll meet more darkness there than light.  And often we do.  It's easier to stay outside, on the surface of things, and ignore the depths.  Some of us have no guide for the inner journey toward healing and wholeness.  

Rainer Maria Rilke is one of the modern world's most insightful, spiritually-grounded, and beloved poets.  I love the way he bridges the two worlds, inner and outer, sacred and secular, and always invites me into the depth of soul I need in order to come more fully alive.   

He gives me courage to enter the labyrinth of the soul.  

His poetic vision is a helpful partner to anyone who wants to integrate their lives more fully.

Here's a sonnet that invites us into the courage it takes to enter our inner lives and face the pain and suffering we'd rather avoid.  

It's a poetic exploration of the themes Dr. Donald Kalsched, the eminent psychoanalyst, explores in his work on trauma, how suffering blocks our life energy, and what it takes for the soul to emerge into the fullness of life.  

Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows have a wonderful translation of this sonnet, as does Robert Bly, and Robert Hunter.  I've lived with Rilke for awhile and with the ways this poem guides not only my own inner journey but also my healing work with others.  And so, I've rendered it myself.  It's impossible to take a poem over from the German into English without allowing the language to dance in new ways.  This rendering is true to the spiritual vision of the great poet, attempts to offer some sense of the lyricism of the German, while drawing it through my own soul's experience and into our new setting.   

Sonnets to Orpheus, No 9

Rainer Maria Rilke, translated/rendered by Chris Neufeld-Erdman

Only you, who dare to lift the lyre

inside the inner labyrinth and maze,

will find the pathway back into the light

of endless gratefulness and praise.

Only you, who on death's bitter flowers

have slept and fed,

will sing a living song

to what was given up for dead.

What shimmers on the pane between the worlds

will quickly slip away;

internalize what you behold.

When born of these two realms

our words and ways

become more valuable than gold.

This Ash Wednesday, consider all that God can do with dust

Image by Kyle Ellefson

On this Ash Wednesday, this remarkable blessing from Jan Richardson.  About it, she says: 

"Ashes, dust, dirt: the stuff we walk upon, that we sweep away, that we work to get rid of, now comes to remind us who we are, where we are from, where we are bound.

"How terrible. And how marvelous, that God should feel so tender toward the dust as to create us from it, and return us to it, breathing through us all the while. Even after releasing us from the blessed dust at the last, God continues to breathe us toward whatever it is we are becoming.

"Ash Wednesday hits close to home once again. My husband’s ashes remain in the keeping of my brother, waiting in a beautiful wooden box that Scott has built for them. This spring we will bury the ashes on the family farm where Gary and I were married not so long ago. And we will breathe, and we will bless the earth from which we have come, and we will give thanks for the astonishing gift that passed too briefly among us but whose love, tenacious as ever, goes with us still."

Read it and embrace your earthen self.

A Blessing for Ash Wednesday

All those days

you felt like dust,

like dirt,

as if all you had to do

was turn your face

toward the wind

and be scattered

to the four corners

or swept away

by the smallest breath

as insubstantial—

Did you not know

what the Holy One

can do with dust?

This is the day

we freely say

we are scorched.

This is the hour

we are marked

by what has made it

through the burning.

This is the moment

we ask for the blessing

that lives within

the ancient ashes,

that makes its home

inside the soil of

this sacred earth.

So let us be marked

not for sorrow.

And let us be marked

not for shame.

Let us be marked

not for false humility

or for thinking

we are less

than we are

but for claiming

what God can do

within the dust,

within the dirt,

within the stuff

of which the world

is made,

and the stars that blaze

in our bones,

and the galaxies that spiral

inside the smudge

we bear.

–Jan Richardson

Christmas on the Valley Floor: The Poetic Vision of John Muir

Image by www.yosemitehikes.com

A poem I've rendered from the lyrical prose of St John (Muir) of the Sierra.  Muir never wrote poetry (to my knowledge), but I find his writings, especially his journals to be stunningly lyrical, and so, this little project to turn some of them into poems.

This one I call Christmas on the Valley Floor.  The angels visited the shepherds on the first Christmas Eve; let us not envy them.  The heavenly messengers are always near us if we have eyes to see and ears to hear their message.   

Christmas on the Valley Floor

 

Christmas brings a cordial, gentle, soothing snowstorm—

a thing of plain, palpable, innocent beauty 

that the frailest child would love.

The myriad diamonds of the sky 

come gracefully in great congregational flakes,

not falling or floating,

but just coming to their appointed places 

upon rock or leaf 

in a loving, living way of their own—

snow-gems, flowers of the mountain clouds 

in whose folds and fields all rivers take their rise.

The floral stars of the fields above 

are planted upon the fields below.

The pines, the naked oaks, the bushes, 

the mosses too 

and crumpled ferns 

are all in equal bloom, 

and belong to the same one great icy order.

Now the last sky blossom has fallen,

the clouds depart in separate companies, 

leaving the valley open to other influences and communions. 

Every tree seems to be possessed 

with a new kind of life—

in sounds and gestures 

they are new creatures, 

born again.

The whole valley, sparkling in the late sunlight, 

looks like a trim, polished, perfect existence.

The dome Tissiack,* 

looks down the valley like the most living being 

of all the rocks and mountains; 

one would fancy that there were brains in that lofty brow.

How grandly comes the gloaming over this pearly beauty!

What praise songs pour from the white chambers of the falls!

Surely the Lord loves this new creation, 

and His angels are now looking down 

at this new thing that His hands have wrought.

Muir’s journal, December 25, 1869, John of the Mountains: Unpublished Journals, p. 39-40.

*Tissiack is the name given to the image of a young woman that can be seen on the face of Half Dome. Indigenous legends tell of an Indian maiden turned to stone by the wrath of the gods; some say her tears are still visible on the north face of the monolith.