look

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With all its eyes, the natural world looks out into the Open. 
Only our eyes are turned backward, and surround plant, animal, child like traps, as they emerge into their freedom.

We know what is really out there only from the animal's gaze; for we take the very young child and force it around, so that it sees objects - not the Open, which is so deep in animals' faces. Free from death.

We, only, can see death; the free animal has its decline in back of it, forever, and God in front, and when it moves, it moves already in eternity, like a fountain.

Never, not for a single day, do we have before us that pure space into which flowers endlessly open. Always there is World and never Nowhere without the No: that pure unseparated element which one breathes without desire and endlessly knows.  

A child may wander there for hours, through the timeless stillness, may get lost in it and be shaken back.  Or someone dies and is it.

For, nearing death, one doesn't see death; but stares beyond, perhaps with an animal's vast gaze.

Lovers, if the beloved were not there blocking the view, are close to it, and marvel...

As if by some mistake, it opens for them behind each other... But neither can move past the other, and it changes back to World. Forever turned toward objects, we see in them the mere reflection of the realm of freedom, which we have dimmed.  

Or when some animal mutely, serenely, looks us through and through. That is what fate means: to be opposite, to be opposite and nothing else, forever.

–Rainer Mara Rilke

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