The older I get, and the more I write, the more I am learning to love words.  And the more I learn to love words, the more I want to write!  Which is a good thing, I think.  I also find myself wanting to read what others have labeled ‘good work’.  At times, I think I obviously must be reading the wrong thing, and I can find nothing redeeming about the work.  Especially if I have to read the same sentence six or seven times and still do not know what I read.  I love reading things that teach me something, or remind me of something I have lived.  But, the best of all is reading something that inspires.  In my mind, there is no greater reading than the books of the Bible.  And, it always brings inspiration to me.  Such powerful words.

This week , I ran across a short piece that I had never seen before.  For if I had ever read it before, I would have not forgotten.  The words the writer uses and the placement of those words, and the imagery, and the places it takes you in your mind…perfection!  I read it again and again and again.

And when you read it, see if you don’t feel everything he is talking about.  See if it doesn’t all make sense to you.  See if you don’t feel transported by the words.  I can imagine the way it must feel to be a flower and open every morning…can you?  Don’t know why, but I felt as if the writer was a woman before I searched out some information.  So,  a little information of the poet and then the  ‘beauty of the written word’.

Info on poet taken from Wikipedia…

René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke (4 December 1875 – 29 December 1926), better known as Rainer Maria Rilke, was a Bohemian–Austrian poet. He is considered one of the most significant poets in the German language. His haunting images focus on the difficulty of communion with the ineffable in an age of disbelief, solitude, and profound anxiety: themes that tend to position him as a transitional figure between the traditional and the modernist poets.

He wrote in both verse and a highly lyrical prose. Among English-language readers, his best-known work is the Duino Elegies; his two most famous prose works are the Letters to a Young Poet and the semi-autobiographical The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. He also wrote more than 400 poems in French, dedicated to his homeland of choice, the canton of Valais in Switzerland.

For the sake of a single verse, you must see many cities, many

people and things, you must understand animals, must feel how

birds fly, and know the gesture which small flowers make when

they open in the morning. You must be able to think back to

streets in unknown neighborhoods, to unexpected encounters,

and to partings you had long seen coming; to days of childhood

whose mystery is still unexplained, to parents whom you had to

hurt when they brought in a joy and you didn’t pick it up (it

was a joy meant for somebody else); to childhood illnesses that

began so strange with so many profound and difficult

transformations, to days in quiet restrained rooms and to

mornings by the sea, to the sea itself, to seas, but it is still not

enough to be able to think of all that. You must have memories of

many nights of love, each one different from all the others,

memories of women moaning in labor, and of light,

pale, sleeping girls who have just given birth and are closing

again. But you must also have been beside the dying, must have

sat beside the dead in the room with the open windows and the

scattered noises. And it is not yet enough to have memories. You

must be able to forget them when they are many, and you must

have the immense patience to wait until they return. For the

memories themselves are not important.  Only when they have

changed into our very blood, into glance and gesture, and

are nameless, no longer to be distinguished from ourselves only

then can it happen that in some very rare hour the first word of a

verse arises in their midst and goes forth from them.