Be Earth Now: Selections from Rainer Maria Rilke's 'The Book of Hours'

This is a limited edition pressing of 500, 140-gram, black vinyl records in deluxe tip-on “old style” jackets. Exquisitely printed on textured, water color paper. Digital download included. Be Earth Now comprises forty minutes of potent poetic recitation by Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows from their seminal translation of Rainer Maria Rilke’s The Book of Hours. Channeled in a spiritual fervor in 1899, The Books of Hours remains a profound and highly prescient body of work. Rilke’s poems illuminate paths of embodied mysticism, passionately express ecological grief, and reveal the exquisite expanses of the human heart. The Book of Hours, and now Be Earth Now, offer a poetic map for navigating the heartbreak, rage, and soaring love that so many of us feel in these ecologically urgent and socially emergent times. Rilke’s poems surge with passion and pain for a world that was already teetering toward peril at the turn of the last century, due to the rapid industrialization of Europe, and humankind’s increasing alienation from nature. This work flowed through Rilke in a torrent with sometimes as many as five or six poems arriving in a single day, each self-complete and with no need for later revision. While truly mystical poetry, Rilke’s musings on spirituality overtly critique fundamentalism and organized religion. Instead, Rilke extolls what he finds sacred in the mundane and conjures a sense of wonder for both the more-than-human-world and simply for existence itself. So, who better to give voice to these mystic treasures than Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows? Not only because of their enchanted translations, but also because these women are unquestionably two of our righteous elders. Macy and Barrows have worked diligently for many decades, through art, activism, education, psychology, and spiritual practice, to bring some balance back to this world. The same world that Rilke pleaded with his God to sustain for “just a few more hours,” so that we might have time to mend our relationship with the natural world, to cherish and connect with what is good and real, and to possibly even learn to “be earth now.”

1: The Hour Is Striking So Close Above Me
2: God Speaks to Each of Us As He Makes Us
3: I Have Many Brothers in the South
4: You God Who Live Next Door
5: You Darkness of Whom I Am Born
6: I'm Too Alone in the World
7: Why Am I Reaching Again for the Brushes
8: I Find You There in All These Things I Care For
9: What Will You Do God, When I Die
10: You Come and Go
11: It Feels As Though I Make My Way Through Massive Rock
12: God Give Us Each Our Own Death
13: I Want to Praise Him Loud As a Trumpet
14: Only As a Child Am I Awake
15: I Am Praying Again Awesome One
16: How Surely Gravity's Law
17: You Are the Future
18: You Too Will Find Your Strength
19: I Live My Life in Widening Circles
20: I Love the Dark Hours of My Being
21: I Ready It Here, in Your Very Word
22: I Believe in All That Has Never Yet Been Spoken
23: She Who Reconciles the Ill Matched Threads
24: I Am You Anxious One
25: I Love You Gentlest of Ways
26: So Now My Prayer Is This
27: Only in Our Doing Can We Grasp You
28: Dear Darkening Ground
29: Lord the Great Cities Are Lost and Rotting
30: Lord We Are More Wretched Than the Animals
31: May Both Voices Accompany Me
32: The Kings of the World Are Old and Feable
33: I Seek You God
34: Extinguish My Eyes I'll Go On Seeing You
35: Sometimes a Man Rises from His Supper Table
36: All Will Come Again Into Its Strength
37: In Deep Nights I Dig for You
38: You Are Not Surprised at the Force of the Storm

Number of Discs: 1

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