Missing Rilke

I love poetry. One of my favorite poets is Rainer Maria Rilke. It has been a long time since I sat down with his selected poems (my favorite translation is by Stephen Mitchell). I think about them often, though. In fact, the title of this blog is from one of his poems---the seventh Duino Elegy. Here is some more of the poem:

Truly being here is glorious. Even you knew it, you girls who seemed to be lost, to go under---, in the filthiest
streets of the city, festering there, or wide open
for garbage. For each of you had an hour, or perhaps
not even an hour, a barely measurable time
between two moments---, when you were granted a sense
of being. Everything. Your veins flowed with being.
But we can so easily forget what our laughing neighbor
neither confirms nor envies. We want to display it,
to make it visible, though even the most visible happiness
can't reveal itself in us until we transform it within.

Nowhere, Beloved, will world be but within us...

I love here how Rilke captures so clearly and beautifully the idea that there is more than one level at which to live. We can get by, even be "successful". We can do and get and have, or we can BE. The gift of "being" is available to anyone, regardless of their class or level of success.

He writes of a "time between two moments" when veins "flow with being." I think that moment is when I suddenly understand a concept more fully and consolidate that understanding with the rest of the knowledge I have gained in my life. It's like I'm connected to life more than the moment before. But the moment doesn't last. John Mayer says it well in his song "Clarity":
"By the time I recognize this moment, this moment will be gone...and I will wait to find if this will last forever, and I will pay no mind when it won't, and it won't 'cause it can't. It's not supposed to."

Actually, I am still deciding whether I agree with the last line or not. Is that higher level of being really not supposed to last, or have we just not figured out a way to stay in that state? I have to wonder if there's a way to stay connected to that clarity, that higher form of energy (see The Celestine Prophecy) in a more permanent way. But I find it difficult to hold on to the energy because no one else sees it in quite the same way, so I inevitably come back to "reality" and move on with my life, often entirely forgetting that one magical moment between moments.

I should break out the poetry more often. :)