"Rooted" - Rainier Maria Rilke

If we surrendered

to Earth’s intelligence
we could rise up rooted, like trees

How surely gravity’s law,
strong as an ocean current,
takes hold of even the smallest thing
and pulls it toward the heart of the world.

Each thing-
each stone, blossom, child –
is held in place.

Only we, in our arrogance,
push out beyond what we belong to
for some empty freedom.

If we surrendered
to earth’s intelligence
we could rise up rooted, like trees.

Instead we entangle ourselves
in knots of our own making
and struggle, lonely and confused.

So, like children, we must begin again
to learn from the things of World,
because they are in God’s heart;
they have never left.

This is what they teach us:
to fall,
patiently to trust our heaviness.
Even a bird has to do that
before he can fly.

"How Surely Gravity's Law" by Rainer Maria Rilke, 
Rilke’s Book of Hours: Love Poems to God