Autumn Day by Ranier Maria Rilke

Lord: it is time. The summer was immense.

Lay your long shadows on the sundials,

and on the meadows let the winds go free.

Command the last fruits to be full;

give them just two more southern days,

urge them on to c

It is Spring in New York City and everywhere the lilies and lavender lilacs sing with color and light. But for some reason, this poem about autumn entered my consciousness today. It has always spoken to me but seems to have renewed personal meaning. The first sentence alone strikes some primal feeling in me.

Religion, I realize, is passe and no longer de rigueur in cosmopolitan cities like New York. But I’ve always felt such a strong religious spirit within. It isn’t the religion most of us think is religion. That religion involves conformity and submission to a worldly mass authority like the Catholic Church or even the Dalai Lama, the one takes words and myths literally and will commit evils in the name of God. The religion I speak of is the religion of the individual soul, the religion that feels some meaning is just outside the grasp of our consciousness but that we all intuitively feel like an itch that cannot ever be reached. The first line speaks to this. Everything always feels immense to me, imbued with so much…