Digging for Treasure

Flights to Spain booked!! I'll be off mid-September to the sunny south for a few months of nature and blissful quiet. Excited? Oh yes. Hip is grumbling less, so I guess all the physiotherapy efforts are paying off; bring on some scrambling over rocky Spanish hills and some hikes through the valleys.

 Just been unearthing my first potatoes of the year - what is it about rummaging around up to your elbows in dirt, hunting for spuds, that instantly produces a sense of childish wonder?! Could not have been happier had someone just turned my house into a chocolate shop. Fabulous. Guess what's on the menu tonight...

Read this poem this morning on the Rilke blog (http://yearwithrilke.blogspot.com/2011/08/may-what-i-do-flow-from-me.html). Love it:

May what I do flow from me like a river,
no forcing it and no holding back,
the way it is with children.

Then in these swelling and ebbing currents,
these deepening tides moving out, returning,
I will sing you as no one ever has,
streaming through widening channels
into the open sea.

                                            - Rainer Maria Rilke

Distractions

I’ve been so distracted this week that I never got round to updating on here. I’ve been reading lots, practising some Spanish and relishing in the rain that has come just in time to save the vegetables in the garden (and they are delicious -homegrown veg tastes so good!). I’ve surprised myself by really enjoying growing veggies this year. I don’t have much interest in growing things that can’t be useful, but it’s been a very interesting experiment that I’m thinking of expanding this autumn.

I’ve got some fascinating books on the go at the moment: The Cage by Gordon Weiss, which is about the conflict in Sri Lanka and I would really recommend it; Sacred Sierra by Jason Webster, about his life on a mountain in Spain; some Schopenhauer, some Rilke…and a wonderfully light read by the wonderful Lloyd Jones called Here at the end of the world we learn to dance. Love it.

The spiky massage ball that I’ve been using on the muscles around my hip really seems to be helping a lot, so I’m moving around a lot more than I have been in recent months, although it’s still quite exhausting. This newly found freedom, plus my reattachment to yoga and recently discovered interests in both organic growing and meditation are leading to new possibilities for autumn forming in my mind. I’m reconsidering uni in favour of working for an environmental organisation in Spain that I’ve wanted to visit for years and years. Either way, autumn is now in sight, and that makes my impatience with my hip easier to manage. It’s great to have a goal, even if I’m not quite sure which goal to aim for yet.

Here's a lovely Rilke poem I came across yesterday:

Whoever you may be: step into the evening.

Step out of the room where everything is known.

Whoever you are,

your house is the last before the far-off.

With your eyes, which are almost too tired

to free themselves from the familiar,

you slowly take one black tree

and set it against the sky: slender, alone.

And you have made a world.

It is big

and like a word, still ripening in silence.

And though your mind would fabricate its meaning,

your eyes tenderly let go of what they see.

Sunset

Sunset - Rainer Maria Rilke

Slowly the west reaches for clothes of new colors
which it passes to a row of ancient trees.
You look, and soon these two worlds both leave you
one part climbs toward heaven, one sinks to earth.

leaving you, not really belonging to either,
not so hopelessly dark as that house that is silent,
not so unswervingly given to the eternal as that thing
that turns to a star each night and climbs-

leaving you (it is impossible to untangle the threads)
your own life, timid and standing high and growing,
so that, sometimes blocked in, sometimes reaching out,
one moment your life is a stone in you, and the next, a star.

Widening Rings

The title of this blog comes from one of my favourite poems from Rainer Maria Rilke:

I live my life in widening rings

which spread over earth and sky.

I may not ever complete the last one,

but that is what I will try.

I circle around God's primordial tower,

and I circle ten thousand years long;

And I still don't know if I'm a falcon,

a storm, or an unfinished song.

Since I first read this poem, I've been fascinated with the idea of stretching out further and further into the world, absorbing more experiences with each circle that time brings. 

This blog is my attempt to stretch out a bit further. A place to collect my thoughts and let new ideas grow. A place for photos, music, poetry and anything else that captures my attention and allows me a new window to see the world through. I also hope to find the courage to post some of my own poems which I've been writing on and off for several years now.

For today though, the words of others fill my mind much more clearly than my own thoughts, and so, until I've got my head around how this blog actually works, I'll stick with Rilke:

Everything is blooming most recklessly; if it were voices instead of colours, there would be an unbelievable shrieking into the heart of the night.

Sunset at Watergate Bay, Cornwall