Pwilkes. A Day Like Today

I am touched by your beautiful anxiety about life, even more than I was in Paris, where everything echoes and fades away differently because of the excessive noises that makes Things tremble. Here, where I am surrounded by an enormous landscape, which the winds move across as they come from the seas, here I feel that there is no one anywhere who can answer for you those questions and feelings which, in their depths, have a life of their own; for even the most articulate people are unable to help, since what words point to is so very delicate, is almost unsayable. But even so, I think that you will not have to remain without a solution if you trust in Things that are like the ones my eyes are now resting upon. If you trust in Nature, in what is simple in Nature, in the small Things that hardly anyone sees an that can so suddenly become huge, immeasurable; if you have this love for what is humble and try very simply, as someone who serves, to win the confidence of what seems poor: then everything will become easier for you, more coherent and somehow more reconciling, not in your conscious mind perhaps, which stays behind, astonished, but in your innermost awareness, awakeness, and knowledge. You are so young, so much before all beginning, and I would like to beg you, dear Sir, as well as I can can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and 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. Perhaps you do carry within you the possibility of creating and forming, as an especially blessed and pure way of living; train yourself for that - but take whatever comes, with great trust, and as long as it comes out of your will, out of some need of your innermost self, then take it upon yourself, and don’t hate anything.

Wait patiently to see whether your innermost life feels hemmed in by the form this profession imposes. I myself consider it a very difficult and very exacting one, since it is burdened with enormous conventions and leaves very little room for personal interpretations of its duties.

-Rainer Rilke - Letters to a Young Poet

I am in Utah tonight, miles from anything. We are 2 hours from a grocery store. 5ish hours from Salt Lake City. Life slows down very quick here. Life comes to a halt when the sun goes down.

I am in the middle of a couple books during this travel. One, Wonder Boys, which Kate gave me for Christmas. I just blew through Letters to a Young Poet by Rilke which is a whopping 109 pages double spaced, and I needed to finish tonight because it’s Mary’s book, and I leave here tomorrow.

I found those two quotes profound on some level.

This has been an extremely peaceful journey: from meeting Benny in Albuquerque who reinstated my belief in human kindness to strangers. From the breathtaking mountain passes and summits of Western Colorado and Eastern Utah. To meeting new people here in Boulder, Utah where life is slow and there is so much more you can get out of life because of that.

It has been snowing this evening, a very peaceful snow. I am happy to be out on the road.

-pw (10:30pm MST)