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

An interview with the translators of Rilke's Letter to a Young Poet. This interview covers our relationships with others, with ourselves, and to the earth. From 120 years ago, some of Rilke's notions are still concepts we are unpacking and can continue to sit with. How should we love? How should we sit with the uncertainty of the future? How can we... See more

“I ask you, dear sir, to have patience with all that is unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves, like closed rooms, like books written in a foreign language. Don’t try to find the answers now. They cannot be given anyway, because you would not be able to live them. For everything is to be lived. Live the questions now. ... See more

“ For love is not about merging. I t’s a noble calling for the individual to ripen, to differentiate, to become a world in oneself in response to another.”

" Don’t let your solitude obscure the presence of something within it that wants to emerge. Precisely this presence will help your solitude expand. People are drawn to the easy and to the easiest side of the easy. But it is clear that we must hold ourselves to the difficult, as it is true for everything alive."

"We’re seeing a huge shattering of life itself. And yet, having been with Rilke, his trust in life is still with me. And so I trust being with life, even though life — the web of life might crumble, but then I’m still with it. I’ll be with it anyway, even in the crumbling."

And we’re learning, how do you say goodbye to what is sacred and holy? And that goodbye has got to be — has got to be in deep thanksgiving for having been here, for being part of it... You can look in each other’s face, see how beautiful we are. It’s not too late to see that. We don’t want to die not knowing how beautiful this is.

It’s a living world. We can listen to it. We can open to it. It’s not a machine that we poke and press and push a button. It’s a mystery. And we meet the mystery, and then it talks.

It feels like there’s something in the heft of what he said and how he said it that he, also, in 1903 when he was writing those letters, was on the cusp of this unimaginable tumult and carnage and transformation of that last century.