Poem

Ah, not to be cut off,
not through the slightest partition
shut out from the law of the stars.
The inner –what is it?
if not intensified sky,
hurled through with birds and deep
with the winds of homecoming.

Buddha in Glory

Center of all centers, core of cores,
almond self-enclosed and growing sweet –
all this universe, to the furthest stars
and beyond them, is your flesh, your fruit.

Now you feel how nothing clings to you;
your vast shell reaches into endless space,
and there the rich, thick fluids rise and flow.
Illuminated in your infinite peace,

a billion stars go spinning through the night,
blazing high above your head.
But in you is the presence that
will be, when all stars are dead.

Translated by Stephen Mitchell

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875 – 1926) was a Bohemian-Austrian poet and novelist and is acknowledged as one of the greatest poets of the 20^th century; several critics have described his work as inherently mystical. Regular motifs include figures from Greek mythology, angels, roses and the poet and his creative work. His existential themes include the difficulty of communion with the ineffable in an age of disbelief, solitude and profound anxiety. He is a transitional figure between the traditional and modern writers. (synopsis from Wikipedia)

In the first poem Rilke addresses our feeling of separation. This vast emptiness he sees at our core is not dead and infinitely dark but in reality ‘intensified sky hurled through with birds and deep with the winds of homecoming.’ I can picture the outline of a man filled with stars – just as the Egyptians pictured Nut, a star-covered nude goddess arching over the earth.

”Buddha in Glory” is the name for the center of centers whose body is made up of the universe of stars. I like his image of the center having a vast shell to which nothing clings, where “the rich, thick fluids rise and flow, Illuminated in your infinite peace.” And while the stars blaze and spin, seemingly forever, this Center “will be, when all the stars are dead.” Does this remind you, as it does me, of Van Gogh’s “Starry Night?”

The star filled sky often is an image of the spirit, infinitely vast, seemingly untouchable; a symbol of hope as well as longing; pinpricks of light shining through the dark ocean of space. But as the mystics have said, and science is now affirming, we are all made of star stuff. What is above is below – from infinity to infinity. How breathtaking to consider our soul is one of the trillions and trillions of lights, each reflecting the other in the Net of Indra.