Love, Ancestors, and the Living Earth

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.
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The coins of happiness unspent by the past begin, at last, to circulate again.
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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.