Catch What You’ve Thrown Yourself
As long as you catch what you've thrown yourself, it's all just clever agility and venial gain; but when you suddenly come to catch a ball an eternal playmate has thrown at you, at your center, has exactly set in mastered motion, in an arc out of God's great bridge-building - then that you catch is real power: not yours, the world's. And when you even have the strength to throw it back, no, better yet: have forgotten courage and strength and thrown it back already...(the way the year throws birds, the flocks of migrating birds hurled over the ocean from an old to a new warmth - ) then, that gamble, is the first moment you too can be said to play. You unburden yourself of the throw no longer; you burden yourself with the throw no longer. Out of your hands steps the meteor and it races into its skies...
Peace, dwight
catching for all
rilke – the man!
I like the new look Dwight. I’ll be passing through Seattle in a few weeks time – it might be good to meet for a coffee if possible? Hope the family are good.
thank you for posting this – just started reading rilke – letters to a young poet. although i am a painter not a poet his advice applies to my own work. do you know in which of rilke’s works exactly this poem appears? thanks.