going far ahead of the road I have begun.
So we are grasped by what we cannot grasp;
it has its inner light, even from a distance--
and changes us, even if we do not reach it,
into something else, which, hardly sensing it, we already are;
a gesture waves us on, answering our own wave...
but what we feel is the wind on our faces.
Rainier Maria Rilke (Robert Bly, trans.)
"The Walk"
The daily walk with the pup does involve a sunny hill in the distance; and it would not be stretching too far to say it has an inner light. Our time, the walk. "What we feel" is so often not what is, or only a surface layer; this seems to me the truth of the poem.
