Obvious. And Not.

Yesterday was the 146th birthday in 1875 of Rainer Maria Rilke.

...human beings are put on earth in order to experience the beauty of ordinary things. – Rilke, from The Duino Elegies

“Oddly, one / lives on, continually torn / between the two significant suspicions: / on the one hand that in all the scheme of things we matter marvelously little; / on the other, that we are the scheme of things.” – from “Significant Suspicions”, by Heather McHugh in Eyeshot, Wesleyan University Press, Middletown, CT, 2003

The Universe (One Voice) is not just “out there.” Nor is it just above, below or over there. Rather, it is an all encompassing here, now. Consider: that which is all encompassing can have no opposite. Much, if not all, our frustrations, anxieties, “suffering” is sourced in our insistence on how we think things should be and an exercised inability to let the universe be what it is. So, what is it? Given the reality of an all encompassing nature, in any given moment, there can be only fear, or love. We choose. What, pray, do you think “free will” means?