Monday, May 10, 2010

The point is to live everything. ~ Rilke

My sis sent me a book last week that opens with the above line from Rainer Maria Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet. I've been wondering since last Thursday: What exactly does this mean? And do I, can I do this? A little googling and I found the full source, or some version of it:

"I want to beg you, as much as I can, to be patient toward all that is unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer."

Yesterday I lived my way into fostering two baby cats who have been displaced in the flood. Saying yes to this was one of the most peaceful things I've done in weeks. It wasn't a question - just an answer.

So I see...this is how the universe unfolds, if I can be patient enough with it.

1 comment:

Maura said...

I read Letters to a Young Poet my senior year of college and it was one of my favorite books ever... thanks for these lines.