Feed your spirit

Rise Up Rooted Like Trees

How surely gravity’s law,
strong as an ocean current,
takes hold of even the smallest thing
and pulls it toward the heart of the world. 

Each thing—
each stone, blossom, child—
is held in place.
Only we, in our arrogance,
push out beyond what we each belong to
for some empty freedom.
If we surrendered
to earth’s intelligence
we could rise up rooted, like trees. 

Instead we entangle ourselves
in knots of our own making
and struggle, lonely and confused. 

So, like children, we begin again
to learn from the things,
because they are in God’s heart;
they have never left him.  

This is what the things can teach us:
to fall,
patiently to trust our heaviness.
Even a bird has to do that
before he can fly.

“Wenn etwas mir vom Fenster fallt.../How surely gravity’s law” by Rainer Maria Rilke; from RILKE’S BOOK OF HOURS: LOVE POEMS TO GOD by Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy, translation copyright © 1996 by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy. Used by permission of Riverhead, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.