Thursday, April 24, 2014

A Rilke Quote & My Mother's Birthday

"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."

from Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke; translated by Stephen Mitchell

And, a letter to my mother, on her birthday:

Happy birthday to my beautiful mother. The one who carried me forth into this cracked landscape of living/breathing. I love you, Mama. Always. I don't need to say these things, I know, because you are always with me, and you know how I feel already. But I say them so people can know you as I have known you. And even that is not really necessary: I am blessed by you and by God to hold now so many of your greatest qualities--openness, trust, kindness, bravery, and it's near twin--bravado in its best sense. You taught me to be bold; you taught me that love moves like a current under everything, even when we think that hope has forgotten who we are. In this great hurricane glass I live in, there is a flame that burns in the center of the smoke. This is who you are now, and I carry you with me, as you carried me from the start.

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