Letter to Rilke

Dear Rilke,

It is morning. It is early in the 21st century. It is already quite warm outside. I am sitting in the shade in America. It is a bright day. I have just spent the night with my lover, but now a gloom comes over me, a feeling of disconnection. Though our bodies were pressed together, i feel the gaps--imagined or real? It doesn't really matter. It is part of the passing show. "Das verrint," you wrote, didn't you?

I send you my love and appreciation for your words, your effort, your heart, soul, imagination, your daring to speak the truth of the imagination, your grappling with the Real, the Divine, with life. I think you got lost, you fell down, you were too afraid of love, after all, and i feel sad about that, about all the men (and women) who close themselves to love for fear of being engulfed, of losing themselves, who instead of finding the deeper path home and daring to lose the false sense of self, the shell of constructed personality, in order to come into true being, close themselves off in narrower rooms, comfortable, familiar rooms, where they can control who they are and what they feel. This isn't it, either. That was your mistake. "Dies ist nicht, Jüngling, daß du liebst," you wrote. This isn't it, young one, your loving. Yes and no.

There is another way, a middle way, a way of rising through relating, allowing relating to another, that dance, to bring you to a more profound relationship with Self. Burning away all that is not needed in the self, a refining process whereby being together and being alone, separate, aren't two opposed ideas or states, but rather one steps freely into the fluidity of simply being, where the truth of oneness with all things balances with the feeling of inhabiting a singular body-mind-being, so that one can come together without a loss of self, and apart without a loss of other, but swim in the greater Sea of Being, which you sensed, you knew, you partook of so many times. You entered those hallowed halls, but then you suffered, shut out from them, unable to find the way back.

I have not mastered this middle way, i lose myself too, or lose the way. I don't know why. But i sense the greater being that is possible. I sense the truth of this path and its great light. And that being alone is not the answer.

Well, i am writing to you, friend, even now, centuries later, to encourage you, since time is an illusion anyway. Let me hearten you on your path and thank you for your great gifts to all of us. And let me ask you to write to me too, to tell me of your struggles, your woes, your flights, your joys, your ecstacies, your understanding and your misunderstanding. I want to hear them all. Let us join hands across time and walk in the garden together.

Yours in loving friendship,