Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows — ‘What a world you’ve got inside you.’ | The On Being Project

In the early 20th century, Rilke wrote a wonderful series of letters to a young poet in which he counseled, "Be patient with all that is unresolved in your heart." He said, "Try to love the questions themselves as though they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language." He said, "Don't try to reach for the answers which could not... See more

In a 1903 letter to his protégé, the 19-year-old cadet and budding poet Franz Xaver Kappus, Rilke writes:

I want to beg you, as much as I can, dear sir, to be patient toward all that is unsolved 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 now

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The world can reach out for you, without thought or plan and, in reaching, reach into your depths. If you have ever sat quietly listening to the sound of the rain, you might have had the experience that after a while you can’t tell what is rain and what is you. It can be an intimate sound, as if the rain were falling through your chest. Sometimes i

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And across my life of conversation, I have learned that wisdom and wholeness emerge in moments precisely like ours, though ours is writ large, where human beings have to hold seemingly opposing realities in a creative tension and interplay, power and frailty, birth and death, pain and hope, mystery and conviction, brokenness and beauty, calm and fi... See more