Roland Faber

“Did we really create it or was it felt by, and fall into, our awareness? In the poet lives the poem, but it arises, appears. We become poets as much through the poem as the poem becomes a poem through us as poets. The poet does not create, the philosopher once said, but saves the world in a poem—so the epigraph of this preamble. In the poet’s vision, the world comes together in its very spirit. In this sense, we are poets of our spirit. Yet the spirit of life is not our spirit. We do not “possess” this spirit. It always arises as a gift, in between things, because of their excess or lack of aesthetic appeal or existential meaning. This appeal or meaning does not gather by a willful act, but neither is it a mere passive given. It comes like “a thief in the night” (Matthew 24:43; 1 Thessalonians 5:2; Revelation 16:15), without warning, always unexpected, and in ways unanticipated—if we let it compose itself. We suddenly become poets when our life’s becoming converges as a poem. Yet we “become” its poets only by sensing its convergent spirit. Not by manipulating it, nor even by steering it willfully, but rather by mediating and meditating on the gift of its spirit. Only in this sense are we poets of our lives, do we become a poem of the Spirit. In the experiences of our lives, the Spirit arises as the event of their meaningful togetherness.”
― Roland Faber, The Cosmic Spirit: Awakenings at the Heart of All Religions, the Earth, and the Multiverse