In the video above, filmed during her recent Garrison Institute retreat, Joanna Macy discusses the poetry and spirituality of Rainer Maria Rilke. She talks about how the young poet found the sacred in ordinary life, how he had an incredible sense of what the 20th century had in store, and how he tells readers to “let everything happen to you, both the beauty and the terror.”
In the context of Macy’s “Work That Reconnects” workshops, poetry can help us to be fully present to our world with both a wide open heart and wide open eyes.
Thank you Garrison Institute for bringing light that shines out and nullifies the grayness and darkness. A light that does so not with chaotic ecstatic happiness, but a light of wisdom that may and can sit one in peaceful hope of being. Thank you.