What Birds Plunge Through Is Not The Intimate Space

Portrait of Rainer Maria Rilke
Rainer Maria Rilke 1875–1926

What birds plunge through is not the intimate space, in which you see all Forms intensified. (In the Open, denied, you would lose yourself, would disappear into that vastness.)

Space reaches from us and translates Things: to become the very essence of a tree, throw inner space around it, from that space that lives in you. Encircle it with restraint. It has no limits. For the first time, shaped in your renouncing, it becomes fully tree.

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