I Love the Dark Hours of My Being, by Rainer Maria Rilke...Happy New Year from Martha Lask

Click on this link for a video card from Martha with her original lettering and a poem from Rilke and music by Stravinsky.

 http://www.zygocom.com/Lask/

 Happy New Year! How quickly the New Year has come around! My blog posting has been on “pause” this past year … I seem to have been harvesting silently during 2013.

This post focuses again on the poem that is the basis of my New Year’s e-card and animation: “I Love the Dark Hours of My Being” by Rainer Maria Rilke. If you haven’t read it, you might want to now……. Click here.

I was drawn to this poem for a few different reasons:

I am interested in the layers of thought and image: “I love the dark hours of my being” has a few different meanings, in my mind. The dark hours of the early morning are special times for me. I love the silence of those hours; it helps me to tune into the silence in myself – “my mind deepens into them.” The “dark hours of my being” also speaks to the times when we are suffering loss and loneliness, and feel a darkness in our souls. And yet another meaning is how poignant it is to remember the past in all of its fullness: how it has shaped us, how we have built onto it, how we have diverged from it, the choices we have made.

I also love the image of the tree rustling over a grave site … It holds hope and growth and affirms life at the same time as it honors what has gone before. Living roots, tall tree, ancestors’ dreams.

So what do I take from this poem into the new year of 2014?

One, to allow ourselves to accept our choices and their results with compassion. Maybe we did not fulfill our own expectations; maybe we did not fulfill the expectations of others. So be it. When we accept our choices, we can honor the “legend” we have created and settle into ourselves, not only deep but also “wide and timeless.”

Two, to actively honor our dreams and the dreams of others who came before. We take our loved ones, both present and gone, into ourselves in the most surprising ways, sometimes in the form of small jewels: the next iteration of an idea, our version of a recipe or a favorite saying.

Three, and a common theme in my blog writing, to take the time for reflection. To honor the quiet moments and to use them to deepen into ourselves so we can assess and rest and “open to another life.”

Finally, amidst everyday life, our dreams rustle. If we are quiet, we can hear them. Dreams are not always to be actualized … that’s okay. We can honor them for the idea, we can choose the ones we want to let go of, we can choose the ones we want to take root. Sometimes letting go of one dream opens the way for the next.

So, I wish for you a 2014 that is deep as well as wide, in which you honor what has gone before you and choose a dream to bring to life!