"So we live here, forever taking leave..."

Every so often, four or five times a year, for no reason that I can yet put my finger on, I will find myself inexplicably awake and usually bubbling with happiness at some pre-dawn hour. This was one of those mornings. I woke at 4 am, three hours before my alarm, and my heart was jumping with excitement. After scrambling into my running clothes and snatching up my iPOD, I tiptoed up the stairs and crept out the front door, where an icy breeze kept me company as I ran up the little hill in front of my apartment to the gravelly trail, and then started towards Scenic Highway. The sky was a rimy landscape of clouds and constellations, and spun just enough ghost gray light to assure my footing and to bleach the outcroppings of boulder and bluff to my right. Chattanooga's lights jewelled the air between the bare branches of trees on my left.

I've been reading Rilke recently, trying to understand him, and these words from his "Duino Elegies" were on my mind as I returned home, muting my music and just feeling the beat of my shoes on gravel, the air rushing in and out of my lungs.

"...Often a star
was waiting for you to notice it. A wave rolled toward you
out of the distant past, or as you walked
under an open window, a violin
yielded itself to your hearing. All this was mission:
But could you accomplish it? Weren't you always
distracted by expectation, as if every event
announced a beloved? (Where can you find a place
to keep her, with all the huge strange thoughts inside you
going and coming and often staying all night.)"

I love the way he speaks of taking notice of the world as mission, one that is too vast for me to accomplish. However, I get the feeling that desire, for Rilke, is a limiting thing, a thing that sours any experience of beauty, that distracts us from taking due notice of what we've been given. I prefer to side with Lewis on the topic of desire: that it is a proof that we were made for a different world. My expectations, far from distracting me from my mission, instead make me aware that deeper meaning underlies each event. In that sense, each event does announce a Beloved. And praise, while still a mission, is also (more Lewis) "appointed consummation." ("I think we delight to praise what we enjoy because the praise not merely expresses but completes the enjoyment; it is its appointed consummation." C.S. Lewis)

So I can "begin again and again the never-attainable praising" as Rilke urges, while not feeling the least bit diminished by my lack of attainment.