Nature, and the things we live with and use, precede us and come after us. But they are, so long as we are here, our possession and our friendship. They know with us our needs and our pleasures, as they did those of our ancestors, whose trusted companions they were.

So it follows that all that is here is not to be despised and put down, but, precisely because it did precede us, to be taken by us with the innermost understanding that these appearances and things must be seen and transformed.

Transformed? Yes. For our task is to take this earth so deeply and wholly into ourselves that it will resurrect within our being. We are bees of the invisible. Passionately we plunder the honey of the visible in order to gather it in the great golden hive of the invisible.

— Rilke, Letter to Witold Hulewicz
November 13, 1925