Desert and poetry medicine:

.

How surely gravity’s law,
strong as an ocean current,
takes hold of even the smallest thing
and pulls it toward the heart of the world.
.
Each thing—
each stone, blossom, child—
is held in place.
only we, in our arrogance,
push out beyond what we each belong to
for some empty freedom.
.
If we surrendered
to earth’s intelligence
we could rise up rooted, like trees.
.
Instead we entangle ourselves
in knots of our own making
and struggle, lonely and confused.
.
So, like children, we begin again
to learn from the things,
because they are in God’s heart;
they have never left him.
.
This is what the things can teach us;
to fall,
patiently to trust our heaviness.
even a bird has to do that
before he can fly.
.
– Rainier Maria Rilke