Two emails in one morning: one celebrating the arrival of a baby girl into a marriage, and the other expressing resignation at the dissolution of a marriage. How close elation stands in relation to disappointment today!

An terrible evening of swirling emotions that running could barely assuage. Sometimes it appears that some days are like knots, where forces are gathered to bend and contort the soul. This may be just maya, nothingness, false perception etc but the feeling of pain is real. And in such a large desolate evening, reading Rilke is a natural choice, his voice like Dante's Virgil calming even if there is this knowledge that he can't and won't take one to Paradiso. In the First Dunio Elegy he says:

And so I hold myself back and swallow the call-note of my dark sobbing. Ah, whom can we ever turn to in our need? Not angels, not humans, and already the knowing animals are aware that we are not really at home in our interpreted world.

Yes, this dichotomy between humans and animals (I see the faces of the three black labradors of a friend's that I often play with), this feeling of exile hiding inside what is also on the surface, a physical and an emotional exile. And then this noise of interpretations, including those of these words I am writing now, a distraction form a mission Rilke ascribes to us:

All this was mission. But could you accomplish it? Weren't you always distracted by expectation, as if every event announced a beloved? (Where can you find a place to keep her, with all the huge strange thoughts inside you going and coming and often staying all night.) But when you feel longing, sing of women in love; for their famous passion is still not immortal. Sing of women abandoned and desolate (you envy them, almost) who could love so much more purely than those who were gratified.

A mission of being present, to notice the star or the waiting to be noticed. And also of motion for stillness also moves like an quivering arrow through space.

Isn't it time that we lovingly freed ourselves from the beloved and, quivering, endured: as the arrow endures the bowstring's tension, so that gathered in the snap of release it can be more than itself. For there is no place where we can remain.

And what is meditation but also this awareness of what is mortal, and what is eternal within:

Strange to no longer desire one's desires. Strange to see meanings that clung together once, floating away in every direction. And being dead is hard work and full of retrieval before one can gradually feel a trace of eternity.

So it is time to come face to face with the Void, to peer into it, and discern the patterns of harmony that will enrapture, that will set me on fire.

But we, who do need such great mysteries, we for whom grief is so often the source of our spirit's growth--: could we exist without them? Is the legend meaningless that tells how, in the lament for Linus, the daring first notes of song pierced through the barren numbness; and then in the startled space which a youth as lovely as a god has suddenly left forever, the Void felt for the first time that harmony which now enraptures and comforts and helps us.