Inner light

A walk

My eyes already touch the sunny hill,
going far ahead of the road I have begun.
So we are grasped by what we cannot grasp;
it has its inner light, even from a distance —

and changes us, even if we do not reach it,
into something else, which, hardly sensing it,
we already are; a gesture waves us on,
answering our own wave …
but what we feel is the wind in our faces.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Selected Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke
translated by Robert Bly

With an entire ocean separating us, I watched a traumatised woman, already suffering the effects of advanced Alzheimer’s, being rescued from chest high water in Houston this morning. The pathos well nigh overwhelmed me. And that was only the first of the day’s news that seemed to suggest, again, that the world has gone mad. There was so much more to follow. One simply doesn’t know what to think or say.

And yet inner light, even from a distance persuades me, even when unable to find words, to stay positive. To hear that it’s not true that everything’s gone to pot. To notice the tenacity and the goodness that resides deep in the heart of humanity and comes to the fore when needed. By grace at work in somebody the elderly lady was rescued and that ought to be held close to our hearts as encouragement for everybody.

May the people of Texas – and the afflicted and the fearful of the world wheresoever they may be – speedily find again a sunny hill.

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