The Focus of the Storm

Joanna Macy reflects on Rilke's Book of Hours, which has served as spiritual nourishment for almost fifty years of soul-searching and activism. "Its images lent some pattern, even meaning, to a life I thought had failed in its spiritual vocation... Now those same lines...shed new light on the patchwork my life had become -- marriage, motherhood, abandoned government career, assortment of jobs, studies in art and language. Perhaps, after all, some unknowable center held me in orbit."