Rilke has a way with words...

As I am prepared to tell the story of my summer field work tomorrow at RMC, I am rereading lots of old journal entries and other books that I read over the summer. One book in particular is Rainer Maria Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet. I highly recommend this to anyone. I want to share a specific excerpt that has really spoken to me many times in the last 6 months.

"Were it possible for us to see further than our knowledge reaches, and yet a little way beyond the outworks of our divining, perhaps we would endure our sadnesses with greater confidence than our joys. For they are the moments when something new has entered into us, something unknown; our feelings grow mute in shy perplexity, everything in us withdraws, a stillness comes, and the new, which no one knows, stands in the midst of it and is silent.
I believe that almost all our sadnesses are moments of tension that we find paralyzing because we no longer hear our surprised feelings living. Because we are alone with the alien thing that has entered into our self; because everything intimate and accustomed is for an instant taken away; because we stand in the middle of transition where we cannot remain standing. For this reason the sadness too passes: the new thing in us, the added thing, has entered into our heart, has gone into its inmost chamber and is not even there anymore,-is already in our blood. And we do not learn what it was. We could easily be made to believe that nothing has happened, and yet we have changed, as a house changes into which a guest has entered. We cannot say who has come, perhaps we shall never know, but may signs indicate that the future enters into us in this way in order to transform itself in us long before it happens. And this is why it is so important to be lonely and attentive when one is sad: because the aparently uneventful and stark moment at which our future set foot in us is so much closer to life than that other noisy and fortuitious point of time at which it happens to us as of from outside. The more still, more patient and more open we are when we are sad, so much deeper and so much more the unswervingly does the new go into us, so much the better do we make it ours, so much more will it be our destiny, and when on some later day it "happens" (that is, steps forth out of us to others), we shall feel in our inmost selves akin and near to it. And that is necessary. It is necessary-and toward this our development will move gradually-that nothing strange should befall us, but only that which has long belongs to us. We have already had to rethink so many of our concepts of motion, we will also gradually learn to realize that that which we call destiny goes forth from within people, not from without into them."

Chew on that for a while and let me know what you think!

I can't wait to see some of your smiling faces tomorrow morning!

Peace,
Jodi