The Man Watching

What if it was true that all our efforting, all our trying was in service of something that's coming for us anyway. How would we feel ?

A wonderful person coached me on the theme of surrender a little while ago and had me read this poem many times, and it has me in it's grips, my curiosity will not let it go. It can feel so wrong to surrender, but the personality isn't into true freedom so no wonder it steers away from it.

The Man Watching By Rainer Maria Rilke

I can tell by the way the trees beat, after
so many dull days, on my worried windowpanes
that a storm is coming,
and I hear the far-off fields say things
I can't bear without a friend,
I can't love without a sister.

The storm, the shifter of shapes, drives on
across the woods and across time, and the world looks as if it had no age:
the landscape, like a line in the psalm book,
is seriousness and weight and eternity.

What we choose to fight is so tiny!
What fights with us is so great.

If only we would let ourselves be dominated as things do by some immense storm,
we would become strong too, and not need names.

When we win it's with small things,
and the triumph itself makes us small.
What is extraordinary and eternal does not want to be bent by us.
I mean the Angel who appeared to the wrestlers of the Old Testament:
when the wrestlers' sinews
grew long like metal strings,
he felt them under his fingers
like chords of deep music.

Whoever was beaten by this Angel
(who often simply declined the fight)
went away proud and strengthened
and great from that harsh hand,
that kneaded him as if to change his shape.
Winning does not tempt that man.
This is how he grows: by being defeated, decisively, by constantly greater beings.

You did not come here to be normal!

So much of the time we are comparing ourselves, trying to 'fit in', be 'normal' like everyone else. And it causes us all manner of pain and problem because it's impossible to live up to what we 'think' others are in terms of relationships, success, money, job, stuff. Because what we think of them isn't true, it's just what we think of them. 

I love this quote from Robert Holden - reminding us that our naturally unique selves, the circumstances and relationships that are only ours are what our lives are about. There's nothing to fit in to anyway. Not really.

A jug fills....

I have been watching the part of my mind that wants things to be done already, that wants life to be completed somehow. I think it's the 'arrived' feeling that I deeply want to experience that I project out into the world, thinking the world is going to do it for me.

This Buddha quote is so simple, and yet there's so much truth in the fact that we only really get anywhere by taking one small step after the other in the direction that our heart tells us is the way to go. 

Sometimes the small steps don't feel like they're big enough, good enough or significant enough, but the more and more I look around, the most successful people, the most fulfilled people have taken millions of tiny steps and a few big ones. But most of them are small ones that end up being strung together to make a life, to fulfill a dream.

Here's to our small steps and the path we carve by putting one foot in front of the other in the direction of our dreams.