Tracing the Constellation of Your Inner Life
Here’s a Rainer Maria Rilke poem that I find full of meaning — despite the fact that it’s one of the shortest poems I know.
With highly distilled wisdom, it reminds us that…
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- We yearn “not to be cut off” from the source.
- Our inner lives are as vast and worthy of exploration as outer space.
- What we all seek is a sense that we’ve come home.
- Home is to be found “in here,” not somewhere “out there.”
- Our inner home is a place of beauty, “hurled through with birds and deep / with the winds of homecoming.”
And Rilke does it all in 39 words, about one-third of the number I used to write this post. Amazing!
Ah, not to be cut off,
not through the slightest partition
shut out from the law of the stars …(Excerpted from Ahead of All Parting: The Selected Poetry and Prose of Rainer Maria Rilke, Translated by Stephen Mitchell. Read the full poem here.)