Rainier Maria Rilke is one of my favorite poets. He writes in “Letters to a Young Poet” :
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.
Live the questions now.
I have had many questions in my heart. I have felt a calling to Nature ever since I was a child, playing amongst the pine trees and within them barefooted.
I feel this conflict between modern civilization and Nature. I wish to be more Native. I wish to be more wild. I wish to let Nature be more wild. This is my question:
How do I initiate wildness in Nature and in myself?
I encourage you to live a question and write it down. Put it somewhere you can see it often. Love the question because it is what you live for.
Here is some poetry where I love and live my question:
the uproot of idealism
indigoapoetry
i am standing upright to notice my voice against the wall.
i am laying parallel to being Nature’s body.
i move to be blessed or to bless.
each flow of movement nowadays uproots me from who i used to be.
i am revoking my idealistic fantasies.
i am every day seeing relations, work, art, and the pull of the sea at eye level.
i tangle myself in human values and in human love and in human art.
so tightly i am in the threshold of civilization that i forget to look up and really inhale
some kind of arc between human and earthly desire.
Here is a poem that I wrote (when I was between jobs) where I express my limitations to running free on the land–
currently unemployed
Indigoapoetry
my body aches tenderly of a prairie home:
large windows for a small abode,
forests and creeks and wild blackberries,
a pull to a homestead that i cannot afford.
my body aches tenderly of gypsy travel:
a van carrying me over sandy mountains,
the sunrise hanging in the rearview mirror,
a pull to a vagabond life that i cannot afford.
my body aches and my body is soothed, tenderly.
i am in a warm house again,
dancing late at dark drumbeat concerts,
getting up early to dream.
I hope to give us all inspiration to live our questions and to awaken with this last poem:
Sweet January Rain (2020)
INIDIGOAPOETRY
Awaken, My Love! Into the morning
song of friendship, daffodil shoots,
the healing rain,
and to when clouds are joyously sung
by those who can fly above and between them.
