RIVERS: the walking swan

 A friend/mentor/wise companion of mine shared this poem with me after a beautiful conversation on our tinkering in the world (and I realized how essential it is to share the original, German version as the translation doesn't really catch everything if you ask me). How grace and clumsyness are so close, and part of one and the same process. How we sometimes have to let things die to move into another shape of movement, form. Between the lines, I read about the contexts we are moving in, about the flow we can dive into with our acting and not-acting, and the courage it takes to move into that stage. What are you reading?

DER SCHWAN
Rainer Maria Rilke

Diese Mühsal, durch noch Ungetanes
schwer und wie gebunden hinzugehn,
gleicht dem ungeschaffnen Gang des Schwanes.

Und das Sterben, dieses Nichtmehrfassen
jenes Grunds, auf dem wir täglich stehn,
seinem ängstlichen Sich-Niederlassen —:

in die Wasser, die ihn sanft empfangen
und die sich, wie glücklich und vergangen,
unter ihm zurückziehn, Flut um Flut;

während er unendlich still und sicher
immer mündiger und königlicher
und gelassener zu ziehn geruht. 

“The Swan”
by Rainer Maria Rilke

This laboring of ours with all that remains undone,
as if still bound to it,
is like the lumbering gait of the swan.

And then our dying—releasing ourselves
from the very ground on which we stood—
is like the way he hesitantly lowers himself

into the water. It gently receives him,
and, gladly yielding, flows back beneath him,
as wave follows wave,
while he, now wholly serene and sure,
with regal composure,
allows himself to glide