Rilke suggested we live the questions now and someday we might live our way into the answers. This poem raises the question about what he meant by the Machine. He capitalized it suggesting it has been given a privileged place in the world.
Does the Machine eat away at our humanness and humanity? Mindfulness allows us to be present, living in the moment, and possibly living our way to answers. Perhaps, this gives us our humanness and humanity even when we do not have the words to express the mystery involved.
The Machine endangers all we have made.
We allow it to rule instead of obey.
To build a house, cut the stone sharp and fast:
the carver’s hand takes too long to feel its way.
The Machine never hesitates, or we might escape
and its factories subside into silence.
It thinks it’s alive and does everything better.
With equal resolve it creates and destroys.
But life holds mystery for us yet. In a hundred places
we can still sense the source: a play of pure powers
that — when you feel it — brings you to your knees.
There are yet words that come near the unsayable,
and, from crumbling stones, a new music
to make a sacred dwelling in a place we cannot own.
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About ivonprefontaine
In keeping with bell hooks and Noam Chomsky, I consider myself a public and dissident intellectual. Part of my work is to move beyond (transcend) institutional dogmas that bind me to defend freedom, raising my voice to be heard on behalf of those who seek equity and justice in all their forms.
I completed my PhD in Philosophy of Leadership Studies at Gonzaga University, Spokane, WA. My dissertation and research was how teachers experience becoming teachers and their role as leaders.
I focus on leading, communicating, and innovating in organizations. This includes mindfuful servant-leadership, World Cafe events, Appreciative Inquiry, and expressing one's self through creativity. I offer retreats, workshops, and presentations that can be tailored to your organzations specific needs.
I published peer reviewed articles about schools as learning organizations, currere as an ethical pursuit, and hope as an essential element of adult eductaion. I published three poems and am currently preparing my poetry to publish as an anthology of poetry.
I present on mindful leadership, servant leadership, schools as learning organizations, how teachers experience becoming teachers, assessement, and critical thinking. I facilitate mindfulness, hospitality retreats. and World Cafe Events using Appreciative Inquiry.
I am writing and researching about various forms of leadership, how teachers inform and form their identity as a particular teacher, schools as learning organizations, hope and its anticipatory relationship with the future, and hope as an essential element in learning.
Teacher as Transformer 
Well written by Rilke.
His poetry resonates through time.
My best moments have been simple. Just a clear mind and going with the moment.
Very well put. It is when we are living in the present and keeping it simple that things happen which are precious.
It was like a distinct calm that came over me around 40 years ago. Those moments may be rare but we miss far too many.
You learned early in life which makes it so much better.
Yet the machine is simply a tool, a different tool from the one we’ve been accustomed to using, and it still takes skill to wield it successfully. Humanness cannot be robbed, it can, however, be relinquished; and it IS relinquished when we buy into believing that it is the Machine doing the work and not the Human using and guiding the Machine that is master.
Interesting…xoxoM
I like that Margarita. Relinquished has a different meaning than robbed and suggests we may not even be aware it is happening. Well put.
Machine could also be a metaphor for the “system” or “politics” or “government” or any institutions that we allow to rule instead of obey the people.
It can be. It suggests a mechanical and external ordering of people rather than an organic and internal ordering.
So well written so deep
Rilke was/is a great poet.
Very metaphorical. Sometimes even the mind can be the most destructive machine.
It can be. When we slow down and just be in the now, it helps.