Seekers and Rilke's "The Solitary"

Friday I posted "The Solitary" by Rainer Maria Rilke. That poem may come as close as any I've read to capturing the inner life of a Seeker - in all its glory and its shame.

The opening stanza captures exceptionally well the basic condition, at least the felt condition, of a Seeker - be he or she a Seeker-Errant, an Eremite or a Coenobite:

As one who has sailed across an unknown sea
among this rooted folk I am alone;

It is the dawning of this awareness that began the quest of every Seeker I have ever known.

I am somehow different.

I don't seem to be seeing the world in the same way as the rest.

I don't know how I got here.

I must have come from somewhere else, from off the map, from Elsewhere.

They are rooted and together.

I am drifting and alone.

...the full days on their tables are their own
to me the distant is reality.

Yes, yes! There is a fullness in the life of these rooted folk that the Seeker has a very difficult time understanding.

Can this be all?

Is this really fullness?

Can they really be satisfied?

Could I? With that?

No.

Sehnsucht surges towards a distant telos, finding dimmest relief only in the first few steps of setting out, in the immediate yielding to wanderlust.

But even then...

The Longing remains.

Where do I set out for and when?

Is the end of the Quest in myself or outside of me?

Is there an end?

If only I had a sign.

Meanwhile:

...their slightest feelings they must analyze,
and all their words have got a common tune.

The things I brought with me from far away,
compared with theirs, look strangely not the same.

Who are these people that "their slightest feelings they must analyze"? Why does the Quest seem to have no hold on them? And what are these things of theirs that mine look so strange amongst them? Is this a trick? A facade? A game?

And yet.

And yet.

I believe that whoever they are, these rooted folk, they are my brothers and sisters.

Somehow, strangely, they are my brothers and sisters.

Perhaps they came from across the same unknown sea so long ago that they have forgotten. Perhaps they can be reminded. Perhaps their memories can be wakened. Perhaps they can learn to see, if even asquint, the far off country. Perhaps they can learn to hear the cry of the gulls, to long for lost Atlantis or distant Tir-nan-Og.

Perhaps that's why I'm here.

On the other hand, perhaps I was sent from across the unknown sea to be at home among them, to give up my wanderlust. Perhaps I was sent to learn - to learn, at least, to live at peace with my burden. Perhaps my eyes are unduly dim to the fullness at their tables, their common tune, and their simple feeling. Perhaps I am the one who needs to be healed.

Perhaps that's why I'm here.

Perhaps.

I suspect, however, that the real answer to why I'm here, why the rooted folk are here, why we're all here, is to be found neither in healer nor patient, but in the place where they meet and vanish into one another - in the healing itself.

I suspect, whether we know it or not, that we are all both healers and patients, seekers and sought, rootless and rooted.

And it is the nameless something at the center around which we dance that animates us all in our glory and our shame.