Happy Birthday, Rilke ✨ Words of Wisdom to Live By ✨

As we grow older, there are people and books that we simple outgrow. The ones that keep pace with us and stay in our lives become more meaningful. Austrian poet, Rilke, (who I read in translation) is like a horizon that way-- he recedes as I approach. At once, tantalizingly close as well as vast and unknowable at his core, like all great artists.

Broadly speaking, I think of Rilke as inhabiting the same territory as Sufi mystic poet, Rumi. It’s a question of passionate intensity, but also commitment, I suppose.
They are both quivering with tremendous yearning, but Rumi names the Beloved and surrenders, while Rilke lingers at the threshold, seeming to shy away from commitment...

I do think that, like Rumi, Rilke was a missionary of sorts (and, by association, I think of Kierkegaard who speaks of G_d recruiting imperfect types like himself for the secret police). Rilke might be a 'river bridge' as the Dalai Lama once wrote of some Buddhas. But, I also wonder if, in rejecting Christianity and fashioning a religion out of poetry, Rilke, succeeded in taking that ultimate spiritual leap and clearing the hurdle of himself...

On his birthday, today, below are excerpts from his spiritually profound and deeply uplifting body of work that I return to for sustenance and inspiration.

I hope that they will do the same for you:

I live my life in growing orbits
which move out over the things of the world.
Perhaps I can never achieve the last,
but that will be my attempt.
I am circling around God, around the ancient tower,
and I have been circling for a thousand years,
and I still don’t know if I am a falcon, or a storm
or a great song.

(You can listen to my reading of this poem, and more by Rilke, on Soundcloud
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Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves.
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The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things.
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Where something becomes extremely difficult and unbearable, there we also stand already quite near its transformation.
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Be ahead of all parting, as if it had already happened...
To all that has run its course, and to the vast unsayable
numbers of beings abounding in Nature,
add yourself gladly, and cancel the cost.
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Believe in a love that is being stored up for you like an inheritance, and have faith that in this love there is a strength and a blessing so large that you can travel as far as you wish without having to step outside it.
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you are not too old
and it is not too late
to dive into your increasing depths
where life calmly gives out
its own secret
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It is our task to imprint this temporary, perishable earth into ourselves so deeply, so painfully and passionately, that its essence can rise again “invisibly,” inside us. We are the bees of the invisible. We wildly collect the honey of the visible, to store it in the great golden hive of the invisible.
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there there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.