Marie Rainer Rilke, the truly brilliant thinker, lover (can one be a "brilliant" lover? but he was such a successful woman's man--reminds me of someone I know), poet, and heart renderer, from his Letters to a Young Poet
“Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions
themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the
answers. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them. It is a question of
experiencing everything. At present you need to live the question. Perhaps you will gradually, without
even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day. ”
I just posted that on Facebook. Too many characters, so I think I put it into a "note." I've carried the message around with me for many years. It just recently disappeared from my wallet, the dollar bill section because it was an 8x11, folded up, rather faded and decrepit sheet of one-time white paper that met its demise legitimately. Rilke is a phenomenon that all readers should read and ponder and feel UN-comfortable with. This particular paragraph is a bunch of words put together that make both mystery and total sense. If you leave your gut to do the work and don't think so hard, you gain extra-ordinary (as in unearthly as we know it, unexplainable but unquestionably real) answers.
Remember the phrase, "suspend disbelief"? I believe that "suspend disblief" means do not think your way through these particular kinds of phrases. They were meant for you to give over to feeling--a task so, so difficult in this day of bits and bites "instruction." Everyone wants to instruct someone on the T-rue way of things, on the R-eal, on the H-onest, and on the P-ath to follow. That kind of thinking has sometimes, perhaps, saved the world. But I think that kind of thinking is clearly and provocatively bringing the "world" to its end, What would happen if we truly lived with the questions? We would probably not be starting so many, many wars and killing so many, many innocents. Who is "we"? Has anyone noticed how, barely out of a recession, and owing so much "money" to Germany and China we somewhow find the necessary "money" to be first respondents to the UN "no fly zone" vote over Libya? And we reply so readily, effectively and heroically? Yay, another "war." We must truly become able to live with the questions because maybe that will make us actually well . . . . . .ask.
I believe that for every drop of rain that falls a flower grows. And I believe that for every question lost an answer grows. Congratulations on entering your new phase. Mikie
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