“I love the dark hours of my life
which deepen my senses;
in them, as in old letters, I find
my daily life already lived
and, like legends, distantly beyond.
From these hours comes the awareness that I
have room for a second life, timeless and wide.
And sometimes I’m like the tree, ripe and
murmuring, which fulfils that dream
above a grave, the one a boy in the past --
so that he could press it into his warm roots --
lost in sorrows and songs.”
~ Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Mark S. Burrows