Love the Questions Themselves

“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 written in a very foreign tongue.” –Rainer Marie Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, 1929

One of my mentors, a women’s retreat leader, used to say something when she guided us into the woods for a weekend.

She said, “The soul is shy.”

When you want to tap into the soul, when you want to open up, when you want to see the deeper levels of things that are calling to you and that are within you, you gotta take a break. You gotta step back and breathe.

When the soul knows you're onto it, it hops around a little bit.

And while you're on break, you get to knowing. You learn to discern, maybe. At the least, you awaken to some degree, and you develop curiosity, and you begin to inch your way back to the thing that felt too big before, the thing which you actually wonder if you might be able to handle.

So touch a tree.

Venture into the forest, or some other unknown territory.

Put your hand in what is bountiful and real, and true. Nature.

Dig into the sand the way a kid does when she sees it for the first time. Watch it fall through your fingers.

There are no answers, mind you. Only questions. Curiosities.

And the living of those things.

We were never made to only do.

What if your life was an experiment?

What if your results were written in a plan you haven't seen?

*

Poetry taps into the ether of everything, and that is why I adore it. It forces you to take a breath. It forces you to step back and ponder and live with a lightness that wasn’t previously in your step.

When you read poems, you open up landscapes inside of you. Space gets created in your heart, your soul, your mind, your yoni. You know more things without knowing anything at all.

We all recognize that it is hard, in this world, to really know what is true, and what is false.

Sometimes the lie a writer or artist puts on the page is the realest thing we’ve ever seen, witnessed, or come to know.

You say, “This person gets me. This person knows who I am.”

But nevermind all the stuff I am saying.

What do you see?

*