Christmas '10

R. M. Rilke, "Ich bin nur einer deiner Ganzgeringen" (Trans. R.Bly)

No one lives his life.

Disguised since childhood,
haphazardly assembled
from voices and fears and little pleasures,

We come of age as masks.
Our true face never speaks.

Somewhere there must be storehouses
where all these lives are laid away
like suits of armor or old carriages
or clothes hanging limply on the walls.

Maybe all paths lead there,
to the repository of unlived things.

I expect this to be my last Christmas in Canada. I'll be moving to a non-Christian country, Buddhist, for a start, and perhaps Hindu in the long-term. There are things to learn and things to wonder about, and that requires confrontation with the real rather than the merely imagined. I find that it's often easier to confront the real when one is confronted with the strange, with a face of reality that doesn't resemble the known. There won't be a final understanding, I suspect, of the True, but there can be glimmers.

I hope to see you all here, all of us pilgrims in search of something more than the assumption.

Merry Christmas.