The Work of the New Year - I

Reading through Tom Cheetham's After Prophecy, this quote strikes me as being particularly significant as we begin the Work that is our task this New Year, 2009. His quote reflects so much of what has been previously posted here in the last days and weeks:

Rilke says: "Perhaps we are here in order to say: house, bridge, fountain, gate, pitcher, fruit-tree, window," but we must speak these names with more intensity than the things could ever have by themselves. The language of imagination is the bridge between the worlds. The divine and the ordinary are fused into one reality in which the immanent and the transcendent are part of a continuous whole. The whole is "mystical" in some sense, but at the same time "purely earthly, deeply earthly, blissfuly earthly." It is Imagination that opens out the ordinary into its "widest orbit," into the realm of the imaginal. It is language that guarantees the existence of these Things: Here is the time for the sayable, here is the homeland. ...The Things that we might experience are vanishing, for what crowds them out ... is an imageless act. It is the imagination, actualized by a person in an imaginal act of personification, that can stand against the imageless act that threatens the existence of Things. The essence of the speech and the witness that exalts the imagination and reveals the angelic function of things of the world is praise: "Praise this world to the angel ... Tell him of Things. He will stand astonished .... (145).