Rilke ~ remembrance

Rainer Maria Rilke

4.12.1875 ~ 29.12.1926

I discovered his poems the same year I found out my father was dying. They came to me like a gentle cool wind, the salve to a grief I was yet to feel. There was something terrifyingly beautiful about his words; heart break and salvation, a depth of wisdom that bypassed my mind and cut straight into my heart. Reading his letters he became an old friend, sharing in sorrow and joy, reminding me of a deeper existence of meaning that I couldn’t quite comprehend but could feel somewhere in the core of my being.

Last night I dreamt of reading books in a language I couldn’t understand. The letters were my own but the words were yet to have meaning. I thought about his advice in Letters to a Young Poet;

“…be patient towards all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms, like books written in a foreign tongue. Do not now strive to uncover answers: they cannot be given because you have not been able to live them. And what matters is to live everything. Live the questions for now.”

Floating in the mouth of the Pambula river, following the wedge tail eagles as they soar overhead, I felt the spirit of inspiration drift up through me, whisperings of beautiful words and ideas. My eagerness moved me to grasp on yet in doing so I felt them slip away between my outstretched fingers, the way the eagles had silently disappeared behind the clouds. His words about time echo’d down the valley toward me;

“…everything must be carried to term before it is born. To let every impression and the germ of every feeling come to completion inside, in the dark. In the unsayable, the unconscious. In what is unattainable to one’s own intellect, and to wait with deep humility and patience for the hour when a new clarity is delivered… it will come. But it comes only to those who are patient, who are simply there in their vast, quiet tranquility, as if eternity lay before them. “

Almost a century on his wisdom still reverberates, carrying me forward into another new year. Yet his words give pause; a reminder to stay still and quiet in that dark place of patience at the shoreline of eternity.