Tuesday, November 22, 2011

Bolg Feature

  
Robyn from ArtPropelled wrote a wonderful post on journals and inspiring quotations and she selected for it some of the most beautiful journals I've seen in a long while. She was so kind to include some of mine.

I literary had to take out my journal and copy some of the quotes people left in their comments. My favorite for today - 

"I want to unfold. I don’t want to stay folded anywhere, because where I am folded, there I am a lie."

       from:
I Am Too Alone
by Rainer Maria Rilke

I am too alone in the world, and not alone enough
to make every minute holy.
I am too tiny in this world, and not tiny enough
just to lie before you like a thing,
shrewd and secretive.
I want my own will, and I want simply to be with my will,
as it goes toward action,
and in the silent, sometimes hardly moving times
when something is coming near,
I want to be with those who know secret things
or else alone.
I want to be a mirror for your whole body,
and I never want to be blind, or to be too old
to hold up your old and swaying picture.
I want to unfold.
I don’t want to stay folded anywhere,
because where I am folded, there I am a lie.
And I want my grasp of things
true before you.  I want to describe myself
like a painting that I looked at
closely for a long time,
like a saying that I finally understood,
like the pitcher I use every day, like the face of my mother,
like a ship that took me safely
through the wildest storm of all.

~ from Selected Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke,
translated by Robert Bly (Harper & Row, 1981)

Go over to Robyn's blog for some quality reading and to her website if you want to see the works of an incredibly talented artist who carves totems in wood.
 

1 comment:

Louise said...

Big fan of Rilke... amazing... thank you for sharing!