Live the Questions

I beg you to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.
Rainer Maria Rilke

Rilke

In deep nights I dig for you
like treasure.
For all I have seen
that clutters the surface
of my world
is a poor and paltry substitute
for the beauty of you
that has not happened yet.

Rainer Maria Rilke

My Birthday

Today is my birthday. I have a book on my new Kindle Fire that gives readings from the poet Rainer Maria Rilke for every day of the year. I was struck by the one for January 30 so I thought I'd share it with you all. It reminds me of something I would write myself.

Alone

No. Of my heart I will make a tower
and stand on its very edge,
where nothing else exists - just once again pain
and what cannot be said, and once again world.

Once again in all that vastness
now dark, now light again, the single thing I am,
one final face confronting
what can never be appeased.

That ultimate face, enduring as stone,
at one with its gravity,
drawn by distances that could dissolve it
into some promise of the sacred.

A Poem by Rainer Maria Rilke

Why am I reaching again for the brushes?

When I paint your portrait, God,

nothing happens.

But I can choose to feel you.

At my senses' horizon

you appear hesitantly,

like scattered islands.

Yet standing here, peering out,

I'm all the time seen by you.

The choruses of angels use up all of heaven.

There's no more room for you

in all that glory. You're living

in your very last house.

All creation holds its breath

listening within me,

because, to hear you

I keep silent.

from the Book of Hours

I Live My Life in Widening Circles

I live my life in widening circles
that reach out across the world.
I may not complete this last one
but I give it to myself.

I circle around God, around the primordial tower.
I've been circling for thousands of years
and still I don't know: am I a falcon,
a storm or a great song?

Rainer Maria Rilke
from The Book of Hours