May92018
Words of WonderBe patient toward all - Reiner Maria Rilke

FROM: LETTERS TO A YOUNG POET

Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart
and to try to love the questions themselves
like locked rooms and like books that are written
in a very foreign tongue.
Do not now seek the answers,
which cannot be given you
because you would not be able to live them.
And the point is, to live everything.
Live the questions now.
Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it,
live along some distant day
into the answer.

– Rainer Maria Rilke

 

It can be so tempting to approach mindfulness and insight from the realm of the intellect, and to think that if only I understand what’s going on, if only I know, then all will fall into place. And yes, it may, but again and again I find the answers need to have their ripening time, and if I try to fast forward they just don’t actually land.

And then, one day, I hear the same thing yet another time, and suddenly it’s crystal clear. “Have I been deaf, all these years?!” a fellow practitioner asked out loud when a penny finally dropped. Rilke reminds me that it’s ok not to know, that “living the questions” is a very alive and fruitful place in itself…

kristine

Photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash

2 Comments

Author: Kristine Mackenzie-Janson

Kristine has been practising Tibetan Buddhism since 2000, and spent four years working and practising meditation on Holy Isle, Scotland. She has trained extensively with Rob Nairn and has been teaching mindfulness and compassion as a lead tutor for the Mindfulness Association since its early days. She offers eight week courses and drop-in sessions near her home in Edinburgh and mindfulness supervision both in person and by phone. Kristine is also a qualified art therapist, having earned her BA (Hons) degree in 2004 at the Hogeschool Leiden in Holland.

2 Comments

  1. I find that when I finally learn deep truths they are often trite phrases I’ve been reciting my whole life, even singing as a child. Only now they are full of meaning and light.

  2. That’s a nice reflection, to think there is undiscovered meaning out there (or in our head) already… I wonder what else will turn out to have rich meaning?

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