“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

Everything is, only I am not. Weird. I see people, houses, traffic but not myself nor a familiar face or story. I am behind my mind  “like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue” and it sees only what is in front of it.   Too many sealed rooms caught in intricate cobwebs and cold air surrounds me.

Was it my choice or was it a result of a “force majeure”?

Both ways. Too many turning points: crucial and salient events paved my journeys.  I have fallen off cliffs. I’ve slid down some slippery slopes into dark but eventually enlightening valleys. I have usually been fortunate and traveled quickly, but there were times when I barely crept along and times when I seemed to lose my way.

My future seems ominously uncertain.  Questions swirling around my head like a carousel.   I am slowly succumbing to inertia but I am trying hard to climb up beyond my ability and leave my emptiness behind . Ranier Rilke said “If your everyday life seems poor, don’t blame it; blame yourself; admit to yourself that you are not enough of a poet to call forth its riches; because for the creator there is no poverty and no indifferent place.”

I believe we were born a poet. We can bring life to what we see and feel.  Words speak images and images speak words.   A poet casts aside controlling, censoring and logical thoughts and looks at the world in an unexpected way.  A painter, a sculptor, a teacher, a surgeon, an actress, a farmer, a mother, or anyone else whose works and life unleash the imagination, is a poet, even a child.

Poet in solitude The problem is, I cannot recall the poet in me. I cannot find its roots in the very depths of my heart.

I cannot describe the images of my dreams as it stopped coming.  I cannot understand the beauty of what surrounds me nor describe my joys, sadness, desires and my memory.  Right now, I fumble for words, clumsily searching for my thoughts. Should I blame myself for this poverty?

The D’s like distraction, depression, deprivation, doubt can hinder us to think outside the box and color the outside lines.  We are sometimes  void of reactions and emotions.  Impatiently, our heart is  imprisoned by too many questions left frequently unanswered.

If you knew that love can break your heart,
If you’re down so low you cannot fall,
Would you change?
“How bad, how good does it need to get?
How many losses, how much regret?
What chain reaction would cause an effect?
Makes you turn around, makes you try to explain,
Makes you forgive and forget, makes you change?

– Change by Tracy Chapman

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kkCxkgDde88[/youtube]

I need to  rediscover the lost place from where my life flows. Inevitably, my relationship with my Creator and with the person I hurt in the past will be restored. Once again I will be able to listen the beautiful melody of a chirping bird, observe the innocent smile of a child and touch an afflicted heart hidden in a courageous person. Appreciate and be immersed in the multi color explosion of life in spite of its blunders and vanities. Most important: to see a familiar face, a story and myself.

Let us live the questions now. Unknowingly, we are slowly unfolding the answers with our pen of life.

RAINER MARIA RILKE QUOTES

It is not inertia alone that is responsible for human relationships repeating themselves from case to case, indescribably monotonous and unrenewed: it is shyness before any sort of new, unforeseeable experience with which one does not think oneself able to cope. But only someone who is ready for everything, who excludes nothing, not even the most enigmatical will live the relation to another as something alive.”
— Rainer Maria Rilke

“If you are patient in one moment of anger, you will escape a hundred days of sorrow”
Rainer Maria Rilke

“Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.”
Rainer Maria Rilke

“Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depth of your heart; confess to yourself you would have to die if you were forbidden to write.”— Rainer Maria Rilke

“We need, in love, to practice only this: letting each other go. For holding on comes easily; we do not need to learn it.”— Rainer Maria Rilke

“Let everything happen to you
Beauty and terror
Just keep going
No feeling is final”— Rainer Maria Rilke

“For one human being to love another human being: that is perhaps the most difficult task that has been given to us, the ultimate, the final problem and proof, the work for which all other work is merely preparation.”
Rainer Maria Rilke

“Love consists of this: two solitudes that meet, protect and greet each other. ”
— Rainer Maria Rilke

“Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness, any misery, any depression, since after all you don’t know what work these conditions are doing inside you? Why do you want to persecute yourself with the question of where all this is coming from and where it is going? Since you know, after all, that you are in the midst of transitions and you wished for nothing so much as to change. If there is anything unhealthy in your reactions, just bear in mind that sickness is the means by which an organism frees itself from what is alien; so one must simply help it to be sick, to have its whole sickness and to break out with it, since that is the way it gets better.”
— Rainer Maria Rilke

“…. believe in a love that is being stored up for you like an inheritance, and have faith that in this love there is a strength and a blessing so large that you can travel as far as you wish without having to step outside it.”
— Rainer Maria Rilke

“…. only someone who is ready for everything, who doesn’t exclude any experience, even the most incomprehensible, will live the relationship with another person as something alive and will himself sound the depths of his own being.”
— Rainer Maria Rilke

“To love is good, too: love being difficult. For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation…Love is a high inducement to the individual to ripen, to become something in himself, to become world for himself for another’s sake, it is a great exacting claim upon him, something that chooses him out and calls him to vast things.”
— Rainer Maria Rilke

“Things aren’t all so tangible and sayable as people would usually have us believe; most experiences are unsayable, they happen in a space that no word has ever entered, and more unsayable than all other things are works of art, those mysterious existences, whose life endures beside our own small, transitory life”
— Rainer Maria Rilke

“And your doubt can become a good quality if you train it. It must become knowing, it must become criticism. Ask it, whenever it wants to spoil something for you, why something is ugly, demand proofs from it, test it, and you will find it perhaps bewildered and embarrased, perhaps also protesting. But don’t give in, insist on arguments, and act in this way, attentive and persistent, every single time, and the day will come when, instead of being a destroyer, it will become one of your best workers–perhaps the most intelligent of all the ones that are building your life.”
— Rainer Maria Rilke

“No one can advise or help you – no one. There is only one thing you should do. Go into yourself. Search for the reason that bids you write, find out wether it spreading out its root in the deepest places of your heart…Delve into yourself for a deep answer”
— Rainer Maria Rilke

Physical pleasure is a sensual experience no different from pure seeing or the pure sensation with which a fine fruit fills the tongue; it is a great unending experience, which is given us, a knowing of the world, the fullness and the glory of all knowing. And not our acceptance of it is bad; the bad thing is that most people misuse and squander this experience and apply it as a stimulant at the tired spots of their lives and as distraction instead of a rallying toward exalted moments.-Rainer Maria Rilke

All emotions are pure which gather you and lift you up; that emotion is impure which seizes only one side of your being and so distorts you.-Rainer Maria Rilke

There is here no measuring with time, no year matters, and ten years are nothing. Being an artist means, not reckoning and counting, but ripening like the tree which does not force it’s sap and stands confident in the storms of Spring without the fear that after them may come no Summer. It does come. I learn it daily, learn it with pain to which I am grateful-Rainer Maria Rilke

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