The Ninth Elegy

Alllriiight. So this is part one of my post. I am having trouble staying focused long enough to write a full post and I feel like this one is long enough...for now. The second part will follow, I promise. Here goes.

I found this in one of my old notebooks that I had brought along with me. It was by accident that I came across this poem, but when I read it I felt like I was reading it at the perfect time and because I needed here. Now. In this place. It's an elegy by the poet Rainer Maria Rilke (who, by that name I thought for sure was a woman....nope.) I'm starting in the jump into the middle of the poem here, but it reads this....

Oh, not because happiness exists, that too-hasty profit snatched from approaching loss. But because being here is so much, because everything here apparently needs us, this fleeting world, which in some strange way keeps calling to us. Us, the most fleeting of all. And so we keep on going and try to realize it, this earth, try to hold it in our simple hands, in our overcrowded eyes, and in our speechless hearts. We try to become it. And give it to whom? We'd rather keep all of it forever... Ah, but what can we take along into that other realm? Not the power to see that we've learned so slowly here, and nothing that's happened here. Nothing. And so, the pain and above all, the hard work of living, the long experience of love-- those purely unspeakable things. For the wanderer doesn't bring a handful of that unutterable earth from the mountainside down to the valley. This is the time for what can be said. Here is its country. Speak and testify. The things we can live with are falling away more than ever, replaced by an act without symbol. Our heart survives between hammers, just as the tongue between the teeth is still able to praise. Look, I'm alive. On what? Neither childhood nor the future grows less...More being than I'll ever need springs up in my heart.

I think that pretty much says it all.

It is by the grace of God that I have found this magical place, and I truly believe that I need this place more than it needs me.

I've been reflecting a lot on these past two weeks. Fourteen days, by most standards, isn't that long. But so much has changed in my life. I've changed, too. And I don't think you have to be Angelina Jolie and have lots of money to make the world a better place. Nor do you have to be Superman and wear a cape in order to do good things. You can just be who you are, whoever that is, and the only requirement is that you have a desire to let this world change you. I don't want to save the world. I just want to make it a better place.

Okay, class over. That's it. Enough motivation for one day.