Painting by Marc Chagall
Center, how from all things
you gather yourself. Even from those that fly
you take yourself back, Center, strongest one.
Those who stand can feel how gravity
plunges through them, like a drink through thirst.
Yet from the sleeper,
gravity drifts like rain
from unhurried clouds.
Uncollected Poems
Can there ever be a better description of that weaker pull of gravity when we're asleep and flying in dreams? It's important that centre is still there, however - though diffused. Removed, and that way madness lies: 'Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold' (Yeats, 'The Second Coming'.)
ReplyDeleteIt's wonderful, Robert, imagining gravity during sleep as light as rain, after visualing gravity in awake hours as a drink through thirst!
ReplyDeleteOur work is to remember the center, whether awake or asleep. I have always been very grateful for sleep, especially knowing that our psyches need it to process so much information absorbed while awake.
ruth my own experience is that the gravity of a day acquires weight as it settles in the body and displaces the true centre and during sleep that very same gravity as rilke so exquisitiely and gently words it, "drifts like rain" in symbol-laden packets that attempt to encode and decode the gravity of the false centre in relation to that of the true centre of my being. the morning's i wake and can't recall my dreams are the most worrisome because then i am left to wonder at the state of the battle for my internal alignment! steven
ReplyDeleteLove the Chagall. I did not want to wake up this morning, that's for sure.
ReplyDeleteCenter is a wonderful name for the Divine.
ReplyDelete-- Marigny Michel