Rainer Maria Rilke | Michael Valliant

It’s tough sitting in not knowing. And at the same time, being able to be okay with not knowing is maybe the key to happiness or joy–being able to live in questions and uncertainty.

One of my favorite Facebook pages is “Contemplative Monk.” This week, they used a meditation on consecutive mornings by a favorite writer of mine:

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 very foreign language.
Do not search for the answers, which
could not be given to 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

It comes from Rike’s “Letters to a Young Poet,” which is a book I keep on multiple shelves, because I forget it and need to hear it a number of times.

And along with Rilke’s words, the folks at CM posted the picture at the top of the page here, and the two washed over me–the peace, the anticipation, sitting at the ready for whatever comes. With coffee. One of my favorite ways to start a day and a posture I try to take when I sit down at my desk in the morning (though my desk has more books strewn about it).

It’s always the questions that drive me, and people a lot smarter than I am point out that we are defined by our questions. Jesus frequently answered questions with questions (or stories), Socrates was known for the same thing, as were the Desert Fathers and all sorts of deep thinkers around the world.

“Live the questions now.” When we hold out for certainty, we are hopelessly stuck. There are so many things I think I’d like to know, which would put my mind at ease, make life more simple. But that’s a waiting game we can’t win, and even in winning, we lose that beginning of the day, sunrise possibility.

The times my heart beats fastest, the times my mind is most open, the times when I feel most connected to God, Creation, other people, are the times when it’s not a matter of knowing or thinking, it’s a moment or experience full of feeling, shared and reflected back. When no amount of knowledge can add a single thing to it.

When I can look with the eyes of a child, the eyes of wonder, and live the questions now.

When does the butterfly read
what flies written on its wings?
Pablo Neruda, “The Book of Questions”

I dig storms. I always have. The build up, the uncertainty, the excitement, the aftermath. Thunderstorms, hurricanes, snowstorms, blizzards. I have biked and run in conditions ill-suited for humans; walked in waist-deep streets after hurricanes and driven around surveying storm and snow damage.

I am not alone. We don’t have a Weather Channel obsession because of days of abundant sunshine.

September is a time of year on the east coast where storms find their way into our psyche–the possibility, the coming of them, the anticipation.

Rainer Maria Rilke is one of a handful of writers I come back to over and again, for inspiration, for glimpses behind the curtain, for a kindred historical soul. Rilke wrote his “Duino Elegies” and “Sonnets to Orpheus” in what can only be described as storms of creativity; visions channeling divine inspiration. He described it as a “hurricane of the spirit.”

mountain-ranges, peaks growing red in the dawn
of all Beginning,–pollen of the flowering godhead,
joints of pure light, corridors, stairways, thrones,
space formed from essence, shields made of ecstasy, storms
of emotion whirled into rapture (from The Second Elegy)

Rilke wrote in a whirlwind. Reading about the intensity of effort and emotion and thought he went through in writing, I’m not sure many of us would want, or survive, his hurricane of the spirit intact.

Being in a constant state of storm, or constantly on guard for a storm doesn’t seem like a way to live life. Richard Rohr‘s daily e-mail yesterday morning offered a different approach to being swept up in the storm.

The contemplative’s inner stance is not one of being swept downriver along with everything else. The contemplative’s repose is not a passive state, but an engaged, silent receptivity… like a riverbed, which is constantly receiving and letting go in the very same moment. Vigilant receptivity and nonclinging release are one and the same for this riverbed awareness as it constantly receives all coming from upstream while at the very same moment releasing all downstream. – Martin Laird

Be the riverbed. That’s easy enough, right? Take all that life throws at you, let it wash over you, and don’t cling too tightly to any of it.

It’s a repose. It’s a metaphor. Easier said than done, but helpful. It’s a letting go of the storm, of worries, while being receptive and mindful. Not a bad stance for a Monday.

Tag: Rainer Maria Rilke

Live the questions now

Hurricanes and Riverbeds