 A reflection inspired by Rainer Maria Rilke In the Fifth Duino Elegy, the poet Rainer Maria Rilke imagines a beautiful and haunting possibility. He wonders what might happen if two lovers were able to truly accomplish what human love so often attempts but rarely fully achieves. He writes of lovers building “towers of pleasure” and “ladders standing where there is no ground,” structures held up only by the trembling devotion of their hearts. And he imagines that if such love could be realized, even for a moment, the silent multitudes of the dead who watch over the living might scatter before them the “coins of happiness” they had saved but never spent. It is a striking image: the unfulfilled love of past generations finally finding completion through the courage of the love of the living. From an ancestral healing perspective, this vision rings true. Each generation inherits not only the wounds of those who came before, but also their longings, their unfinished tenderness, and the love they were never able to fully express. When we deepen our capacity to love—whether through devotion, healing, or conscious relationship—we are not only transforming our own lives. We are participating in the evolution of love across time. In this way, love becomes an ancestral healing act. Yet Rilke’s vision extends beyond human relationships. In the Ninth Duino Elegy he turns his attention to the Earth itself and asks: “Earth, isn’t this what you want? To arise in us, invisible? What, if not transformation, is your deepest purpose?” Here the poet suggests that the Earth longs to become conscious through us. The rivers, mountains, forests, and soils that formed our bodies also seek expression through human awareness—through our words, our attention, and our love. If this is so, then our work of love is not only personal and ancestral. It is ecological. In animist traditions, humans are seen as living in intimate relationship with the beings and spirits of place. Land is not simply a backdrop to life; it is kin. Rivers are relatives. Forests are elders. In the past, some traditions even recognized forms of relational bonds or marriages between humans and land guardians, animals, water spirits or other beings of place, sacred relationships that anchored communities in mutual care with the landscapes that sustained them. These practices reflect a simple understanding: belonging to a place is a form of love. Today many of us live with fractured relationships—to our ancestors, to our lands, and to each other. Healing often begins by remembering that these relationships were never meant to be separate. The love that flows through family lines is intertwined with the love that flows through the land beneath our feet. When love deepens in one place, it begins to heal the others. Seen through this lens, Rilke’s two poems form a kind of wholeness. The first reminds us that the courage to love more fully can redeem the unspent tenderness of those who came before us. The second reminds us that the Earth itself longs to participate in this transformation. Perfecting love, in this sense, does not mean achieving perfection. It means deepening our devotion to relationship—to people, to ancestors, and to the living world that holds us. When we do this work, even imperfectly, we participate in a quiet repair across generations and landscapes. The coins of happiness unspent by the past begin, at last, to circulate again. -- The poem excerpts I refer to from Rainer Maria Rilke: (From the Fifth Duino Elegy) Angel! Suppose there’s a place we don’t know of, and there, on an indescribable carpet, lovers announced those feats that they never mastered here — the bold, high figures of their heartleaps through space, their towers of pure pleasure, their two ladders that stand, leaning only against each other, with no ground underneath, trembling — and then performed them, before the circle of onlookers, the innumerable silent dead: would not those dead throw their last coins of happiness — hoarded through a lifetime, kept hidden through a lifetime, unknown to us, eternally valid — onto the blissful carpet before a pair now truly smiling at last? (From the Ninth Duino Elegy) Earth, isn’t this what you want? To arise in us, invisible? Is it not your dream, to enter us so wholly there’s nothing left outside us to see? What, if not transformation is your deepest purpose? Earth, my love, I want it too. Believe me, no more of your springtimes are needed to win me over — even one flower is more than enough. Before I was named I belonged to you. I see no other law but yours, and know I can trust the death you will bring.
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 About a year ago I married the nature spirit who tends a marine reserve near my home. At the time I did not know that this was a practice that is well documented around the world. As this relationship deepens it feels more and more important to share this with the world. We are in a time where relationship is being redefined and this is just one more way to express love as a human. The relationship with this being began for me when I started to get a sense of something “peering into” my thoughts as I walked in the forest. When there was an act of vandalism to one of the trees, I performed a ritual to express my grief and rage, and it felt like that opened the door a little further between me and this entity I was beginning to sense. One day I decided to communicate with the entity telepathically and a conversation ensued. From then on whenever I would enter the forest there was a recognition of this consciousness’ presence. I had someone in my life at the time that was initiating me into exploring conscious psychic sexuality and when this relationship was ending another entity stepped forward as a partner… that partner was the spirit of the forest. I write this with a raw vulnerability mostly to share that this is a full partnership, not just a deep friendship. The spirit of the land told me they could be known as Duwaenem, which translated to “life on poisoned land”. The land is near a refinery and toxic plumes come there regularly, but life still abounds. Their mother was a land faery and their father was Sidhe, so they are a hybrid. They also sometimes came in a more male form and sometimes in a more female form, so I use the pronoun “they”, but they always came with an energy that I immediately recognized. About five years into our relationship Duwaenem asked me to marry them. At the time this was way outside of my sense of normalcy, which you can see is pretty out there (because I regularly talk with faeries). It took a year for them to convince me, not through any coercion, but through deepening the relationship until it felt right. I did enter into the relationship with the stipulation that I could have a human partner, perhaps even get married, as this felt important for my own wholeness. We have children. I’ve been shown that the reason this is possible for me is because I have had previous incarnations as fae and carry this in me still. It is like there is a faery body within my human one. I remember as a child I was enamored with the book “No Flying in the House” about a little girl who discovered she was part fairy. But interest in fairies faded and I lost touch with any recognition of that part of reality for a couple of decades. It felt like a youthful recognition of something that I have re-discovered as an adult. My connection to nature spirits has increased since our marriage. It is like I’m a conduit for that consciousness and sometimes when I touch a tree it feels like I’m creating a telephone connection between the land of my love and that tree. This reality may be hard for some to understand and some may call it imagination. To those I would say that the imaginal, where the fae exist, and the imagination are inextricably linked. Think of it as the imagination as the medium that receives input from the imaginal. Well, receiving is too passive...it is co-creating which honors that we are actively shaping multiple levels of reality with our hearts and minds. There are many ways for us to relate to the world around us and a spirit mate is just one. I share this important part of my life in order to open new possibilities to others. Since my marriage I have discovered other people who have done something similar, including an ancestral guide, and this has helped to normalize this. I hope to pay that forward to anyone who also is discovering relationship in this new way. ----- Addition: I am adding to this post a wonderful resource for more information on Spirit Mates. Megan Rose has just published a book on this topic and you can learn more in this really comprehensive interview: |
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Photos from steve p2008, rex.on.life
