Speaking of ants -

Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy translated Rilke's Book of Hours.

In Anita's introduction, she writes how she and Joanna "allowed these poems to reveal their meanings to us."

    "I discovered yet deeper resonances between them and the most pervasive themes of my life. Rilke's love for things of this world, his insistence that they, we, are what is sacred, his capacity to see the holy in the ordinary - all these have continued to inform my own poetry for thirty years."

       Rilke - I, 1

             I know that nothing has ever been real
             without my beholding it.
             All becoming has needed me.
             My looking ripens things
             and they come toward me, to meet and be met.

She continues:   "A person (or a thing) comes to exist by being met in the most authentic way by another. My practice of psychotherapy has been deeply informed by the Jungian principle of reciprocal individuation, which means that a deep and loving encounter is what generates development.  How close this is to Rilke's declaration that our greatest summons is really to see the things of this world. 

    We are because we are seen; we are because we are loved.  The world is because it is beheld and loved into being.  On a silent retreat, while watching a line of ants traveling up a hillside, words came to me that I would repeat again and again in my mind:  I am in the world to love the world.  I knew, standing there in the parched summer grasses, how deeply the poems of The Book of Hours had already penetrated my being, speaking to me as instructions for living."

This is a wonderful book to open and carry around, inside and out, through the summer hours, and into fall.