Rainer Maria Rilke

• “Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now 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.” ― Rainer Maria Rilke

How surely gravity’s law,
strong as an ocean current,
takes hold of even the smallest thing
and pulls it toward the heart of the world.

Each thing—
each stone, blossom, child—
is held in place.

Only we, in our arrogance,
push out beyond what we each belong to
for some empty freedom.

If we surrendered
to earth’s intelligence
we could rise up rooted, like trees.

Instead we entangle ourselves
in knots of our own making
and struggle, lonely and confused.

So, like children, we begin again
to learn from the things,
because they are in God’s heart;
they have never left him.

This is what the things can teach us:
to fall,
patiently to trust our heaviness.
Even a bird has to do that
before he can fly.

― Rainer Maria Rilke

• Yet they who belong to the distant past are in us, serving as impetus, as a burden to our fate, as blood that can be heard rushing, as a gesture rising out of the depths of time. – RAINER MARIA RILKE, Letters to a Young Poet

_This is the creature there has never been.
They never knew it, and yet, none the less
They loved the way it moved, its suppleness
Its neck, its very gaze, mild and serene.
Not there, because they loved it,1 it behaved
As though it were. They always left some space.
And in that clear, unpeopled space they saved
It lightly reared its head, with scarce a trace
Of not being there. They fed it, not with corn,
But only with the possibility
Of being. And that was able to confer
Such strength, its brow put forth a horn. One horn.
Whitely it stole up to the maid to be
Within the silver mirror and in her.
_Rainer Maria Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus.