Amidst Transitions - Rainer Maria Rilke

It seems to me that almost all our sadnesses are moments of
tension, which we feel as paralysis because we no longer
hear our astonished emotions living.  Because we are alone
with the unfamiliar presence that has entered us;
because everything we trust and are used to is for a 
moment taken away from us; because we stand in the midst
of a transition where we cannot remain standing...

[.....]

And that is why it is so important to be solitary and
attentive...  The quieter we are, the more patient and open
we are, the more deeply and serenely the new presence can
enter us, and the more we can make it our own, the more it
becomes our fate; nothing alien happens to us, but only what 
has long been our own...

What we call fate does not come into us from the outside,
but emerges from us...
We move in infinite space...

[.....]

We must accept our reality as vastly as we possibly can.

Only someone who doesn't exclude any experience,
even the most incomprehensible, will live the relationship
with another person as something alive and will himself
sound the depths of his own being.

[.....]

Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest sense,
something helpless that wants our love.

So you mustn't be frightened, dear Mr. Kappus, if a sadness
rises in front of you, larger than any you have ever seen; if
anxiety, like light and cloud-shadows, moves over your hands
and over everything you do.  You must realize that something
is happening to you, that life has not forgotten you, that it holds
you in its hand and will not let you fall...

Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness, any
misery, any depression, since, after all, you don't know what
work these conditions are doing inside you?  Why do you
want to persecute yourself with the question of where all this
is coming from and where is it going?  Since you know, after all,
that you are in the midst of transitions...

[.....]

Rainer Maria Rilke

Excerpts from "The Eighth Letter"
From: Letters to a Young Poet

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering
Twilight Edge