Now you must go out into your heart as onto a vast plain
Ranier Maria Rilke and nature as soulscape
When my oldest son was in 2nd grade I tried peddling Little House on the Prairie as a book pick. He wasn't persuaded by my ardor for the story. He was equally unmoved by my nostalgia for it.
"What's a prairie?" he nonchalantly asked as he filled his cereal bowl.
What...Is...A...Prairie?????!?!?!?!? I stared at him, mouth agape. Are you kidding me? Can this be happening?
I felt an icy rush of panic. I mean I know I'm not an ideal parent or anything, but this felt like incontrovertible evidence that I had unforgivably failed my child.
As a kid from the West my most native conception of "vacation" meant enduring 10+ hours of soul-crushing boredom as we drove across the relentless brown plains of Eastern Colorado and Western Kansas to visit family in Missouri year after year. My 4th-grade unit on Colorado State History covered the Homestead Act, The Gold Rush, and various riffs on Western Expansion (notably not a peep about the Sand Creek Massacre). Covered wagons were a feature on many school field trips. Groundhogs and rattlesnakes were our familiar pests and predators.
My high desert brain simply could not compute this oversight. How had I failed to convey something (anything!) about the wild, vast, open prairies of the West to my son's fertile imagination? How had I missed the reality that prairies were wholly outside his Washington Beltway orbit of experience? How had I not realized that his densely-populated, geographically proximate East Coast conception of "vacation" meant hopping a train to Manhattan for the weekend or driving a few quick hours on traffic-and-tree-lined routes to Rehobath or the Outer Banks? I shuddered at the thought that I was raising a Virginian (?!) and vowed to take more family trips out West. STAT.
In retrospect, I probably shouldn’t have been at all incredulous that my city kid lacked understanding about Midwest grasslands at age eight. Still, it is strange for me to imagine my own soulscape apart from those limitless plains. I suspect that was the real source of my incredulity: The notion that someone (anyone! ) can come of age without access to landscapes that viscerally reinforce how small one is against the sheer magnitude of Creation. And while in theory, I can imagine there are infinite other ways to learn about and calibrate to reality, standing alone against a swath of wide open, big-sky nothingness sure is efficient.
For the past several weeks these landscapes have been fresh in my mind as I’ve returned again and again to one haunting and beautiful thought from Ranier Maria Rilke’s poem “Onto a Vast Plain”, which reads: “Now you must go out into your heart / as onto a vast plain”.
The next jarring truth follows immediately: “Now / the immense loneliness begins."
Onto a Vast Plain
By Ranier Maria Rilke translated by Joanna Macy
You are not surprised at the force of the storm—
you have seen it growing.
The trees flee. Their flight
sets the boulevards streaming. And you know:
he whom they flee is the one
you move toward. All your senses
sing him, as you stand at the window.
The weeks stood still in summer.
The trees’ blood rose. Now you feel
it wants to sink back
into the source of everything. You thought
you could trust that power
when you plucked the fruit:
now it becomes a riddle again
and you again a stranger.
Summer was like your house: you know
where each thing stood.
Now you must go out into your heart
as onto a vast plain. Now
the immense loneliness begins.
The days go numb, the wind
sucks the world from your senses like withered leaves.
Through the empty branches the sky remains.
It is what you have.
Be earth now, and evensong.
Be the ground lying under that sky.
Be modest now, like a thing
ripened until it is real,
so that he who began it all
can feel you when he reaches for you.It is hard to say exactly what Rilke is writing about in this fearsome and powerful poem. Is he speaking to a spiritual crisis? Some other kind of personal crisis? A pending decision? A crushing disappointment? The ache and burden of guilt? A life transition? A moment of euphoria? A flash of inspiration? All are equally fitting with a bit of context or imagination.
Likewise, the “you” and the “he” are wonderfully (if maddeningly) versatile: is it addressed to God? To mankind, universally? To a personal friend? To a lover? To the self? To all of the above? Does the “you” change its subject as you read? Is it altered by personal circumstances? Does it shift ever-so-slightly every time you read it? Definitely.
Undeniable, however, is how effectively this poem pulses with all of the ardor, tumult, mystery, and magnitude of our inner lives. Using images from the wildness of nature, Rilke brings forward the storms of terror, hesitancy, anticipation, error, and questioning that pepper our existence: “now it becomes a riddle again / and you again a stranger.”
Referencing the natural rhythms of seasons and time he reminds us what it is to feel anchored and certain: “Summer was like your house: you know / where each thing stood.” Conversely, how time can confound us, “The days go numb. The wind / sucks the world from your senses like withered leaves”, and, sometimes, make us feel outside of it: “The weeks stood still in summer…”
But then in a stunning turn toward hope and resolution, the poem ends by again bringing nature to our aid. In a final, profound, and deeply grounding sequence, Rilke invites us to gather up all of our inner tumult and strife and dwell in the place we are: “Be earth now, and evensong. / Be the ground lying under that sky. / Be modest now, like a thing ripened until it is real, / so that he who began it all / can feel you when he reaches for you.”
Be modest now, like a thing ripened until it is real… I love that. Be modest now, under this endless, steady expanse of sky and earth. Let it hold you. Let yourself be held and ripened. Let nature do its work. Then, consider who holds all of that. Consider that you, too, are held by the one who began it all, the one who is reaching for you.
Just a few days ago I was reminded of a favorite verse from Exodus 14:14 in conversation with a friend who is far out on the vast plains of her own heart and seeking courage to abide its immense loneliness. The verse reads, quite simply: “The Lord will fight for you, you need only be still.”
It is from a passage where God is speaking to the Israelites after they’ve fled Egypt and are being pursued to the edge of the Red Sea. They, too, are seeing the force of the storm gather across a vast plain. They are longing, desperately, like the trees and the sea and everything else in view, to “sink back into the source of everything”. They, too, are doubtfully, thinking to themselves “You thought you could trust that power…”
And the word of guidance, the word of truth offered, “you need only be still”, sounds an awful lot like what Rilke gives us: Be modest now. This wildness is well beyond you. Allow yourself to be ripened. Wait to be reached for.
For some, I suspect, speaking about nature in spiritual terms like this, may raise a few heckles. One of the great fathers of Romanticism, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, was a devout and passionate Christian man who was plagued by profound giftedness, physical suffering, and moral weakness for much of his short life. His work often likens the life of the Spirit to the natural world and, perhaps in part because of his well-known moral failures, he is frequently dismissed as a Pantheist.
This particular accusation has always irritated me for reasons I will expound on in some future post if and when it ever seems worthwhile to recount some stupid theological instruction I received as a precocious third grader. Still, I mention it simply to say that it brought me extra delight to read Malcolm Guite’s pithy rebuttal to this short-sightedness in his commentary on Coleridge’s poem “Frost at Midnight”. Guite, an avid Coleridge fan, writes, “This is not the pantheism of which Coleridge is sometimes falsely accused. On the contrary, God transcends nature, which is not God himself but is his language.” (emphasis mine).
Isn’t that JUST GREAT? The idea that this tiny majestic hummingbird buzzing near my head, or that neon sunset over the valley last weekend, or that intricate, glistening spider web on my porch rail is God speaking to me in his native tongue? Speaking, in fact, with all the tenderness of an immigrant or refugee mother who sings to her child in her first language so the child will know more of her and their shared world as they grow. Of course, nature is God’s language. We are remiss when we miss or distort this.
As Guite writes in the same passage, “The very fact that we find a constant and seemingly natural correspondence between the outer and inner may itself be a clue to the nature of the universe and our role in it. It may not be simply that we project, but that we, ourselves a part of nature, are finely attuned to and can give a conscious “inward” expression to its outer meanings.” Yes, and yes again, Sir Malcolm.
For me, as I come full circle and reconsider the plains of my childhood and the longing I have for my own children to feel and know that kind of vast, open wildness, my deepest hope is not really about any particular geography, but rather that they will increasingly gain access to images that are robust and worthy enough to hold the complexity of their souls. When Rilke says, “Now you must go out into your heart / as onto a vast plain” I need to know they have some kind of vast plain as a reference to navigate what is at stake in that kind of spiritual risk. Even more, when he speaks of that plain’s “immense loneliness” it matters to me that they know it is both metaphorical and not.
The idea that we need physical anchors to grasp spiritual reality is both ancient and sacramental (by definition). There is nothing new about it. Nor is the idea that nature can be an important teacher and guide in our faith. But it is often the simplest truths that are most easily lost.
More than anything, I am keen for both myself and those I care for to know there is no corner or reach of our soul’s experience that falls outside God’s interest. Nature helps us understand this, as do poets. When my heart and soul are wholly convinced the sky is falling, it is a profound comfort and grace to let the world itself reminds us: “The sky remains / it is what you have.”