Last night a dear friend and chef came over and cooked the quintessential cold winter dinner. The kind that warms you from the inside out. After copious amounts of visual, olfactory, oral and auditory pleasure (great music as well!) our bellies were full and our cup ran over with delight. After the kitchen was cleaned and lights turned out, I found my beloved cozy in our sanctuary reading. I curled up next to him grabbing Rilke’s book on “love and other difficulties”. For years Rilke has been one of my favorite thinkers and poets. Here is what else I feasted on tonight:
“Sex is difficult, yes. But they are difficult things with which we have been charged; almost everything serious is difficult, and everything is serious.”
“Physical pleasure is a sensual experience no different from pure seeing or the pure sensations with which a fine fruit fills the tongue; it is a great unending experience, which is given us, a knowing of all the world, the fullness and the glory of all knowing. And not our acceptance of it is bad; the bad thing is that most people misuse and squander this experience and apply it as a stimulant at the tired spots of their lives and as distraction instead of a rallying toward exalted moments.”
“All beauty in animals and plants is a quiet enduring form of love and longing … patiently and willingly uniting and increasing and growing, not out of physical delight, not out of physical suffering, but bowing to necessities that are greater than pleasure and pain and more powerful than will and withstanding. O that man might take this secret, of which the world is full even to its littlest things, more humbly to himself and bear it, endure it, more seriously and feel how terribly difficult it is, instead of taking it lightly.”
“The thought of being creator, of procreating, of making” is nothing without its continuous great confirmation and realization in the world, nothing without the thousandfold concordance from things and animals – and enjoyment of it is so indescribably beautiful and rich only because it is full of inherited memories of the begetting and the bearing of millions. In one creative thought a thousand forgotten nights of love revive, filling it with sublimity and exaltation. And those who came together in the night and are entwined in rocking delight do an earnest work and gather sweetnesses, gather depth and strength for the song of some coming poet, who will arise to speak of ecstasies beyond telling.”
To take seriously our call to live with intention and attention to all that is gift and with it, to make more love in and for this world … is a serious and honored call … one filled with awe and delight. Do not miss the blessing to enjoy and cherish that which is before you!
