“I learn it every day of my life,
learn it with pain, which I am grateful for:
patience is everything!”
Rainer Maria Rilke
“I would like to beg you, [dear human] 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. . . . the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, some day far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.”
Rainer Maria Rilke
. . . don’t make anything up, just be lost. Then you might wake up one day and bump into something large and substantial.
Rainer Maria Rilke
I have had an interesting day-before-the-day-before Thanksgiving. A kind-of-a not-knowing sort of day . . . I had to run errands, deal with administrative tasks, drive to the East Bay, make dinner plans, laugh at a joke with a friend, talk with clients.
There are two great horned owls on our property and I listened to their hooting across the acre or so that separates them while watching a bobcat slink along our hillside. It was about 4:30 in the afternoon. I washed dishes, took out the trash, and made dinner - a very ordinary day, really. Mostly a "not knowing" day . . . easy . . . without much efforting.
And then I had to put the car in the garage . . .
I found myself putting on my socks when I felt a surge of joy, and then gratitude, run through my body. “Ah, socks, I love socks . . . how wonderful.” There wasn’t anything objectively special about it, but the fact that something so mundane could blast the walls of my mind apart in an instant was pure delight.
Patience with the "not knowing" experience as I move through my days gives me the freedom to be here now, . . . the freedom to feel joy . . . and feel grateful.
Grateful.
Grateful.
Grateful.
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