“…go to the limits of your longing.”

“It’s all I have to bring today…,” Emily Dickinson once wrote.

Thank you, Emily. Because I have nothing of my own to offer on this end-of-summer morning. The days are shortening. The world is spinning off its axis.

I am so, so tired.

I send my bucket into the well, and all that comes up is mud and sludge. I ask myself, Why send the bucket down again and again? Except for the hope that it will be filled with clear, cool water. Just once.

Yes. There is always that hope. Stubborn, unreasonable. Which is part of the nature of hope.

But we are in a drought here. The flowers we planted in the spring are worn out, drooping. The hot sun is singeing the edges of the leaves, the petals. And the dandelions, which spring up everywhere and all the time, are absent without leave.

I am tired. Which is to say, I am bone weary.

I have nothing else to offer in this moment.

Except a poem that feels like a balm and a benediction. Written by Rainer Maria Rilke and translated by Joanna Macy.

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God speaks to each of us as he makes us,
then walks with us silently out of the night.

These are the words we dimly hear:

You, sent out beyond your recall,
go to the limits of your longing.
Embody me.

Flare up like a flame
and make big shadows I can move in.

Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.
Don't let yourself lose me.

Nearby is the country they call life.
You will know it by its seriousness.

Give me your hand.

Book of Hours, I 59

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Let’s you and I go gently into this day.