Widening circles and rooted trees

I'm re-reading an old favourite in my morning meditation time: Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God. (Translated by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy) Two recent poems connected so well with my current review of my journals. The first one echoes the reason I chose Concentric Circles as the name of this Blog:

I live my life in widening circles

that reach out across the world.

I may not complete this last one

but I give myself to it.

I circle around God, around the primordial tower.

I've been circling for thousands of years

and I still don't know: am I a falcon,

a storm, or a great song?

The next one expresses poetically the experience of reading back through all those years:

I love the dark hours of my being.

My mind deepens into them.

There I can find, as in old letters,

the days of my life already lived,

and held like a legend, and understood.

Then the knowing comes: I can open

to another life that's wide and timeless.

So I am sometimes like a tree

rustling over a gravesite

and making real the dream

of the one its living roots

embrace:

a dream once lost

among sorrows and songs.