Rainer Maria Rilke

On Solitude:
"Therefore, dear Sir, love your solitude and try to sing out with the pain it causes you. For those who are near you are far away, you write, and this shows that the space around you is beginning to grow vast. And if what is near you is far away, then your vastness is already among the stars and is very great; be happy about your growth, in which of course you can't take anyone with you, and be gentle with those who stay behind; be confident and calm in front of them and don't torment them with your doubts and don't frighten them with your faith or joy, which they wouldn't be able to comprehend. Seek out some simple and true feeling of what you have in common with them, which doesn't necessarily have to alter when you yourself change again and again; when you see them, love life in a form that is not your own and be indulgent toward those who are growing old, who are afraid of the aloneness that you trust."

On Christ:
"Why don't you think of him (Christ) as the one who is coming, who has been approaching from all eternity, the one who will someday arrive, the ultimate fruit of a tree whose leaves we are? What keeps you from projecting his birth into the ages that are coming into existence, and living your life as a painful and lovely day in the history of a great pregnancy? Don't you see how everything that happens is again and again a beginning, and couldn't it be His beginning, since, in itself, starting is always so beautiful? If he is the most perfect one, must not what is less prefect precede him, so that he can choose himself out of fullness and superabundance? - Must not he be the last one, so that he can include everything in himself, and what meaning would we have if he whom we are longing for has already existed?"
- Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

Rilke is moving me and losing me in the vast solitude he praises, it's petrifying and beautiful. And I wonder, could we each be simply living a day of the great pregnancy which will reach it's fullness in Christ's birth? What do you think?

My Mind and My Travels

I hardly know where to begin this post. I've actually been putting it off, because it feels like reporting a list of events, and not actually thinking anything. And who wants to read a list?

Let's try and get the list out of the way quickly: we went to San Fran, I wandered around Market and Mission and we went to a Giants game. That's 2 pro baseball games on this trip. I don't even follow baseball.

Then we moved north seeking the Pacific Ocean, and found it. And it was very, very cold. We tried to stay in a hostel, but it was full and found ourselves camping for $10 night, not bad. We also picked up a "friend" who was very interesting! He wore pirate shorts, and nothing else, we talked about how he would sum up the world with the word "Huh?" and about pot. He slept on our picknick table at the campsite. It was Friday night, and since we were already where we needed to be, we tried to head up to the vineyard we were supposed to start working. But they wouldn't let us come until Monday. So we spent 3 nights camping and hanging out, bathing in the lake. The nights got mighty cold for camping.

When we finally got to the vineyard, we were greeted with "Hey you're here, put up this clothesline." Basically the folks we were working for were miserable people who couldn't afford regular work crews and were using WWOOFers to do harvest for them. The other workers were most interested in smoking up and drinking, but they were just fine, we enjoyed them. We only stayed for 3 days and then ran away in the middle of the night to escape the bosses and "slavery", and laughing to ourselves that they had actually made us afraid! We went back across the state to the Catholic Worker, where people are glad you are there, feed you well and treat you with basic dignity.

We contacted the ranch we had plans with next, and asked if we could show up early, and they gave us the go ahead. We arrived Saturday night, to horses, milk cows, and wide open spaces in the Nevada desert.

In the midst of all this it's tough to figure out how I see God at work, what I am learning, what the point in any of it might be. I've been having lessons in learning to simply be, sitting beside a lake with nowhere else to be, may be enviable, but it can also make one feel wasteful. Is being quiet and unproductive wasteful?

I've been rereading The New Friars and asking this time what I can apply to the life I am already living. I don't want to be immobilized by it's radical call, I want to be changed. And I'm asking God to make next steps a little clearer, I have the ideas I've been thinking about, but I want to be sure He is leading, not me. And then there is learning how to communicate well with others, how to put others first. Trying to remember that God wants to work the fruit of the Spirit into my life, and that I must seek first the Kingdom.

My brain and heart are in as much a whirlwind as the traveling and working we've been doing.