Give me your hand

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.

– Rainer Maria Rilke


'Let everything happen to you...'

I feel the seductive beauty of that instruction with an ache in my collar bone. A lust for the parts of life I hold myself away from - it's a yearning to live as near a luminous, unleashed lustre as I can stand and that means bearing the wrench and wreck of all that we avoid.

The sluggish shadows of disappointment my eagerness and anticipations make.
The quivering shadows of vulnerability my courage cast.
The dense shadows of my blind spots - all the things about me everyone else can see but me....

When I falter and find myself grasping at smoke I reach out for another person to be near enough to me, looking at what I can't see yet, to coax out my bravery in the seeming threat of those shadows. Because I want to let more in.

To blaze.

In my work I respond to those who reach out to me when they feel themselves suffocating in their own shadows. My job is to listen deeply and witness simply the 'everything' that is happening to them and notice the god that is dancing in those dark and heavy places with its divine hand outstretched to take you out of the limits of the world and back into yourself.

Tell me, what is the everything that is happening to you now.