Hope in living the questions

Those big, enduring questions that we carry around don’t have simple answers – as if there is a single solution.

We are meant to live with them and let them grow us.

Being open to the shafts of light given to us along the way: from within, from the natural world and each other.

As the poet Rainer Maria Rilke advised a young poet:

“I ask you, dear sir, to have patience with all that is unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves, like closed rooms, like books written in a foreign language. Don’t try to find the answers now. They cannot be given anyway, because you would not be able to live them. For everything is to be lived. Live the questions now. Perhaps you then may gradually, without noticing, one day in the future live into the answers.”

+ Rainer Maria Rilke, excerpt from Letter 4, in Letters to a Young Poet, translated by Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows

I wonder, what is the beautiful question you have permitted yourself to carry at the moment?