This Having Been Earthly

Mo and I wandered down the road this morning to the mailbox to see if the proof for my new novel, The FarNear Journals had arrived. We went slowly. The road is steep and in places the stones skid on the dry and dusty way. Mo wanted the journey to be faster and pulled on the leash which was locked so I could more easily swing my walking stick. Leaves from the madrone had fallen and lay like old coins on the path. At the pace I walked I could see everything I passed--the tunnel webs of the brown recluse spiders who have been prolific this year in the long dry grass, the tough moss-green star thistle, holes marking the tunnels of ground squirrels, the curling bark of the young manzanita, clumps of mistletoe on branches of oak. What would it be like to travel the world this way, like a Russian pilgrim, the Jesus Prayer spiraling non-stop through mind and heart?

At the mailbox the road was quiet. Inside the box, a few letters, no book.

Making our way back up the hill, we stopped by the pear tree to admire the elegant Flemish Beauty and take a picture. During the past week I've been re-reading the poetry of Rilke, and on Saturday I ordered his Letters on Life, selections from over a thousand of those letters to friends, family and other poets. The pear made me think of a passage that struck me yesterday:

"The longer I live, the more urgent it seems to me to endure and transcribe the whole dictation of existence up to its end, for it might just be the case that only the very last sentence contains that small and possibly inconspicuous word through which everything we had struggled to learn and everything we had failed to understand will be transformed into magnificent sense."

 But to have been

once, even though only once:

this having been earthly seems

lasting, beyond repeal.

All that we

can achieve here, is to recognize

ourselves completely

in what can be seen on earth

RANIER MARIA RILKE

DUINO ELEGIES (NR 9)