Advent Hope - Art and Soul 10

An offering from Susan McCabe - member of St John's community, who shared this painting and this poem to go with it:

Sonnets to Orpheus, Part two, XII 

Want the change. Be inspired by the flame

Where everything shines as it disappears.

The artist, when sketching, loves nothing so much

as the curve of the body as it turns away.

What locks itself in sameness has congealed.

Is it safer to be gray and numb?

What turns hard becomes rigid

and is easily shattered.

Pour yourself like a fountain.

Flow into the knowledge that what you are seeking

finishes often at the start, and, with ending, begins.

Every happiness is the child of a separation

it did not think it could survive. And Daphne,

becoming a laurel,

dares you to become the wind.

Rainer Maria Rilke

(translated by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy)