The Far Places Within Me, 30 x 30 in, oil on canvas
In preparing for our move, I had a yard sale this past weekend. I sold a lot of books–because they had become burdensome and heavy to me in my mind. Not my art books, however. They are stored and ready for shelfing wherever we land. As I spent the weekend manning the sale, I experienced a retrospective of all my interests and yearnings from years ago. All the stages of my reading were there displaying the development of my thinking, my passions, and my desires. The travel books for trips not yet taken (Prague), the obsession with the writer’s life which came before my visual art (that creative solitude thing that is central to who I am), the parenting books that were so important before I realized it was my children who were teaching me. I let these symbols of my past interests go onto someone else’s bookshelf to be pondered and processed and incorporated into their knowledge and sensitivities.
So for today, it is these words from Rilke that inspire me to continue to feel within the every breath all that has transpired before and all that will come in the future, but most of all–to recognize what is here right now. Breathe in, breathe out.
Breath, you invisible poem! Pure, continuous exchange with all that is, flow and counterflow where rhythmically I come to be.
Each time a wave that occurs just once in a sea I discover I am. You, innermost of oceans, you, infinitude of space
How many far places were once within me. Some winds are like my own child.
When I breathe them now, do they know me again? Air, you silken surround, completion and seed of my words
Sonnets to Orpheus Rainer Maria Rilke
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