"You who let yourselves feel: enter the breathing"

What happens when I get on my hands and knees?

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You who let yourselves feel: enter the breathing

by Rainer Maria Rilke

You who let yourselves feel: enter the breathing
that is more than your own.
Let it brush your cheeks
as it divides and rejoins behind you.

Blessed ones, whole ones,
you where the heart begins:
You are the bow that shoots the arrows
and you are the target.

Fear not the pain. Let its weight fall back
into the earth;
for heavy are the mountains, heavy the seas.

The trees you planted in childhood have grown
too heavy. You cannot bring them along.
Give yourselves to the air, to what you cannot hold.

from In Praise of Mortality: Rilke's Duino Elegies & Sonnets to Orpheus, by Rainer Maria Rilke, Translated by Joanna Macy

Painting: detail from Calm Sea by Gustave Courbet, 1865

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Creative Invitation

Get onto your hands-and-knees. No matter how old or creaky you may feel. Get onto your hands and knees, and sway your hips, and let something fall off you, let some weight slip down your neck or out of your ribs.

“Fear not the pain. Let its weight fall back into the earth,” Rilke writes. What else will you fear not?

Imagine what energy you are letting fall off, fall back into the earth today. Draw or describe this energy as it leaves you and is absorbed into the porous, resilient earth.