Letters To A Young Poet

I was listening to Krista Tippett read her book on Speaking of Faith today and she quoted a passage of Rilke that touched me as particularly relevant to my life today. I copied it from this wonderful site which allows you to read the letters in full.

You are so young, so much before all beginning, and I would like to beg you, dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.

I am trying to follow some unresolved questions in my own heart. I'm trying to remember a time when I felt more freedom to dream and desire. And I like this reminder that answers are only valuable if I'm able to live them. There's a lot that can be known with the mind, but not the body and spirit, and that knowledge hasn't served me all that well. I'm trying to take the time to let my body and spirit catch up to things I've been telling myself in my mind.