Hugh Byrne - June 21, 2026

 

Hugh Byrne

June 21, 2026

——-

Live Summary, Sunday, June 21, 2026: It was good to be with you for our live session on Sunday. The theme of the session was ‘Three key Buddhist teachings of freedom.’ We focused on the third of the teachings—making the obstacle the path.

Here are some of the main themes, poems, and quotes from the live session: 

We began by reviewing the first two teachings that we discussed in the previous session: 1) to ‘see for yourself’—the Buddha’s teaching to test whether particular actions lead to well-being or to harm and suffering, and to choose those that lead to happiness, well-being and freedom; and 2) the path to freedom comes through meeting our present-moment experience with acceptance. As the Buddha said, mindfulness is the ‘direct path to liberation.’ 

We then focused on the third key teaching of the Buddha: to treat difficulties and obstacles as opportunities to see clearly and awaken, rather than seeing them as barriers that get in the way of our happiness and freedom. 

In Zen Buddhism, it’s said that ‘the obstacle is the path.’ Turning towards the difficulty and saying ‘yes’ to it, meeting it without resistance, is the key to freedom. Adversity and difficulties point us to what we need to see and learn. Someone who triggers anger, judgment or blame in us is pointing us to something that we need to investigate and let go of (even if this is typically not their intention).

The Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke provided encouragement to ‘always trust in the difficult.’ In his ‘Letters to a Young Poet,’ he wrote:

• “We have no reason to harbor any mistrust against our world, for it is not against us. If it has terrors, they are our terrors; if it has abysses, these abysses belong to us; if there are dangers, we must try to love them. And if only we arrange our life in accordance with the principle which tells us that we must always trust in the difficult, then what now appears to us as the most alien will become our most intimate and trusted experience. 

How could we forget those ancient myths that stand at the beginning of all races, the myths about dragons that at the last moment are transformed into princesses? Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.” (Rilke, ‘Letters to a Young Poet.’) 

When we trust in the difficult we’re changing our orientation—rather than seeing the thing that seems to be causing us problems as a barrier or obstacle to our happiness, we can turn towards it as an opportunity or a challenge and a place to find true happiness. Without difficulties and obstacles, we would have little impetus to examine what we are holding on to or resisting, we’d have little reason to explore our suffering. The difficulties are where we can investigate the cause of our suffering and wake up… 

The way we work with difficulties is to turn towards the judgment, the blame, the anger—or whatever appears as a difficulty or problem—and allow ourselves to feel it. Notice the story or narrative that typically accompanies the difficult feelings—'he’s a bad person’, ‘they’re cruel and thoughtless’, etc.—and let the stories and narratives go without holding on to them… and let the feelings come and go in their own time… We can ask ourselves, ‘What am I clinging to that is keeping me in this relationship of resistance to my experience?’

The Sufi poet Rumi in his poem ‘The Guest House’ invites us to ‘welcome the guests’, ‘even if they’re a crowd of sorrows.’ He continues: ‘The dark thought, the shame, the malice // Meet them at the door laughing // And invite them in // Be grateful for whoever comes // Because each has been sent as a guide from beyond.”

Typically we live our lives caught up in pushing and pulling—pushing away the things we don’t like and pulling towards us things we want or like. When this is our orientation—the lens through which we look at and experience the world—then we will suffer because life won’t always give us what we like and keep away what we don’t like—and we’re dependent on outside conditions to provide us with happiness.

However, when our orientation is to see the difficulty as the path, then nothing is inherently a problem: What would otherwise appear as problems are experienced as situations to deal with, challenges, and opportunities for growth. We’re not depending on anything outside ourself being any particular way. Our happiness, well-being, and true peace depend on our own actions. We can still change what needs to be and can be changed. In Eckhart Tolle’s words: 

• “Wherever you are, be there totally. If you find your here and now intolerable and it makes you unhappy, you have three options: remove yourself from the situation, change it, or accept it totally. If you want to take responsibility for your life, you must choose one of those three options, and must choose now. Then accept the consequences. No excuses. No negativity. No psychic pollution. Keep your inner space clear.’ (Tolle, ‘The Power of Now’, p68)

Other quotes and poems I shared included:

• “Not everything that is faced can be changed; but nothing can be changed unless it is faced.” (James Baldwin)

• John O’Donohue, poem ‘Fluent’: “I would love to live // Like a river flows, // Carried by the surprise // Of its own unfolding.”

Wishing you a good week ahead and see you on Sunday, July 12 at 9am eastern for our next live session. Warmly, Hugh 🙏🏻 💜 🌻

Art of Power: Rilke: Let this darkness be a Bell tower

 The Art of Power 

Pages 65- Getting what we really want

The powerful discussion of craving about craving delusion, love, bodhissttva,….

All this offered via a Wednesday morning, May 13 via the Wednesday morning 7 AM Eastern daylight time from Stillwater morning group Deana and Larry hosting

Yhttps://wordsfortheyear.com/2020/04/02/let-this-darkness-be-a-bell-tower-by-rainer-maria-rilke/

https://onbeing.org/poetry/let-this-darkness-be-a-bell

Quiet friend who has come so far,

feel how your breathing makes more space around you.
Let this darkness be a bell tower
and you the bell. As you ring,

what batters you becomes your strength.
Move back and forth into the change.
What is it like, such intensity of pain?
If the drink is bitter, turn yourself to wine.

In this uncontainable night,
be the mystery at the crossroads of your senses,
the meaning discovered there.

And if the world has ceased to hear you,
say to the silent earth: I flow.
To the rushing water, speak: I am.

 

“Let This Darkness Be a Bell Tower” by Rainer Maria Rilke from Sonnets to Orpheus II, 29. Translation by Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows. Source: On Being “A Wild Love for the World”

Live the Questions Now, by Rainer Maria Rilke

LIVE THE QUESTIONS NOW

https://www.awakin.org/v2/read/view.php?tid=747

In the great silence of these distances, 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 noise 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 the small Things that hardly anyone sees and 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, 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. 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.

--Rainer Maria Rilke, from "Letters to a Young Poet"

Fwd: Live the Questions Now, by Rainer Maria Rilke

From Rainer Maria Wilke's letters to a young poet. 

Dear D, you had a portion of what I boldfaced below on your refrigerator when you lived on L Avenue in SP back in the 70s, early 80s. Love from your bro, Chick

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 the small Things that hardly anyone sees and 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, 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. 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.

--Rainer Maria Rilke, from "Letters to a Young Poet"

https://www.awakin.org/v2/read/view.php?tid=747

Hugh Byrne - Jul 14

 

Dorothy Hunt - 

Wendell Berry - the peace of wild things

Wisdom in Turning towards our experience

What I resist, persists. Languishing in Victimhood?

Eckhardt Tolle: what you accept fully you go beyond?

Triggered by someone? Something  I need to look at  … why cling to it.. if there is suffering, there is something I’m doing to support that suffering, something I’m clinging to … can I be with this? What an I feeling in my body?

If I can stay with it, expand my window of tolerance, I will see its changing nature  a wisdom in turning towards it  I can experience the feelings in my body, allow myself to feel  all the separate energies of fear will come and go and I will be able to see it —- make the obstacle the path “

If A restless mind is the obstacle to being calm, then my attention to that can be the antidote  instead of  saying my mind is too busy, I can’t meditate, instead I turn towards it, and say yes  

neurosis is always a way of avoiding existential intensity. Bruce Tift.  A variation of Jung’s comment. Neurosis

We can learn to ride the waves of difficult experience . Nothing lasts forever. 

Rilke: What appears to us as the most difficult … only a dragon who needs love. Who needs our attention. 

Bringing in the heart, bringing in compassion in a moment of compassion. Bringing in kindness to ourselves. 

Book by  Christina Feldman- the boundless heart - compassion as an attitudinal  commitment. Bringing love and kindness to all our experience and to all people even those who push our buttons. 

Include all in our Lovingkindness practice. 

Joanna Macy on How Rilke Can Help Us Befriend Our Mortality and Be More Alive – The Marginalian

Dial Up the Magic of This Moment: Philosopher Joanna Macy on How Rilke Can Help Us Befriend Our Mortality and Be More Alive – The Marginalian

Rilke’s grasp of the transient nature of all things is critical to his capacity to praise and to cherish.

[…]

In the face of impermanence and death, it takes courage to love the things of this world and to believe that praising them is our noblest calling. Rilke’s is not a conditional courage, dependent on an afterlife. Nor is it a stoic courage, keeping a stiff upper lip when shattered by loss. It is courage born of the ever-unexpected discovery that acceptance of mortality yields an expansion of being. In naming what is doomed to disappear, naming the way it keeps streaming through our hands, we can hear the song that streaming makes.

His capacity to embrace the dark and to acknowledge loss brings comfort to the reader because nothing of life is left out. There is nothing that cannot be redeemed. No degree of hopelessness, such as that of prisoners, beggars, abandoned animals, or inmates of asylums, is outside the scope of the poet’s respectful attention. He allows us to see that the bestowal of such pure attention is in itself a triumph of the spirit.

Rilke would teach us to accept death as well as life, and in so doing to recognize that they belong together as two halves of the same circle.

In the book, Macy highlights one particularly poignant 1923 letter to the Countess Margot Sizzo-Noris-Crouy, in which 48-year-old Rilke writes:

The great secret of death, and perhaps its deepest connection with us, is this: that, in taking from us a being we have loved and venerated, death does not wound us without, at the same time, lifting us toward a more perfect understanding of this being and of ourselves.

He adds:

I am not saying that we should love death, but rather that we should love life so generously, without picking and choosing, that we automatically include it (life’s other half) in our love. This is what actually happens in the great expansiveness of love, which cannot be stopped or constricted. It is only because we exclude it that death becomes more and more foreign to us and, ultimately, our enemy.

It is conceivable that death is infinitely closer to us than life itself… What do we know of it?

In the same letter, he admonishes against our crippling compulsion to deny death, which only impoverishes life:

Our effort, I suggest, can be dedicated to this: to assume the unity of Life and Death and let it be progressively demonstrated to us. So long as we stand in opposition to Death we will disfigure it. Believe me, my dear Countess, Death is our friend, our closest friend, perhaps the only friend who can never be misled by our ploys and vacillations. And I do not mean that in the sentimental, romantic sense of distrusting or renouncing life. Death is our friend precisely because it brings us into absolute and passionate presence with all that is here, that is natural, that is love… Life always says Yes and No simultaneously. Death (I implore you to believe) is the true Yea-sayer. It stands before eternity and says only: Yes.

Rilke captures this even more beautifully, at once with astonishing intellectual precision and astonishing spiritual expansiveness, in his poetry. In a recent conversation with Krista Tippett on the always soul-stretching On Being, Macy discusses Rilke’s emboldening views on mortality and reads some of his poems on death and consciousness. Here is Macy reading Rilke’s “The Swan” — coincidentally, the poem that appears as the day’s reading in A Year with Rilke on the date of this recording, July 13:  A reading of the Swan by Macy on Sound Cloud. 

Also this blog post by Popova on Macy and Rilke:  https://www.themarginalian.org/2021/06/29/rilke-letters-to-a-young-poet-macy-barrows/

Rainer Maria Rilke: Let This Darkness Be a Bell Tower

 

LET THIS DARKNESS BE A BELL TOWER

by Rainer Maria Rilke

Quiet friend who has come so far,

feel how your breathing makes more space around you.
Let this darkness be a bell tower
and you the bell. As you ring,

what batters you becomes your strength.
Move back and forth into the change.
What is it like, such intensity of pain?
If the drink is bitter, turn yourself to wine.

In this uncontainable night,
be the mystery at the crossroads of your senses,
the meaning discovered there.

And if the world has ceased to hear you,
say to the silent earth: I flow.
To the rushing water, speak: I am.

 

Complement with the great Buddhist teacher Pema Chödrön on transformation through dark times, Emily Dickinson’s darkness-inspired ode to resilience, and Rebecca Solnit on hope in the dark, then revisit Rilke on the relationship between solitude, love, and creativity, the lonely patience of creative work, and the difficult art of giving space in love.

https://www.themarginalian.org/2023/01/11/let-this-darkness-be-a-bell-tower-rilke/

Byrne - May 8, 2022 - Freedom of the Heart

Live Session Summary, Sunday, May 8, 2022: The theme of Sunday's Live session was ‘Trusting in the Difficult’. I spoke about the way we tend to habitually respond to difficulties by trying to push them away, avoid them, blame ourselves or others for them, or repress them. While it can be wise to move away from what is threatening to us, often, responding with aversion—for example, anger, judgment or blame—to what we don’t like or want is a way of resisting the experience of unpleasant feelings or emotions. Turning towards and opening to the difficult can be a powerful doorway to freedom of the heart. 

I quoted one of Rilke’s ‘Letters to a Young Poet’ where he advises the young man to ‘always trust in the difficult… Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love…’ 

When we ‘trust in the difficult’, what appears as a problem can be experienced as an opportunity to free ourselves from unhelpful habitual responses. I shared some of Pema Chodron’s reflections on the Tibetan word shenpa, which means a ‘hook’ or ‘being hooked’, and that shenpa is like an itch that we habitually want to scratch—but scratching only makes the itch worse. She says, ‘…the only way to ease our pain is to experience it fully. Learn to stay. Learn to stay with uneasiness, learn to stay with the tightening, learn to stay with the itch and urge of shenpa, so that the habitual chain reaction doesn’t continue to rule our lives…’

I spoke of how ‘trusting in the difficult’ is at the heart of the Buddha’s core teaching of the Four Noble Truths—a shorthand statement of this teaching might be, when we cling, we suffer. When we let go of clinging, we experience freedom from suffering—and when we let go completely, we experience complete freedom. Being willing to stay with and experience what is difficult or unpleasant, as both Rilke and Pema Chodron discuss, provides a path to letting go and finding freedom. 

In Zen Buddhism, they say: ‘The obstacle is the path’. If we chose to go through our days treating what’s difficult not as a problem to be avoided or resisted but as an opportunity to open and be present with the difficult or unpleasant experience, this way of seeing can transform our life and lead us to ever deeper levels of freedom. 

The poems I shared included Rumi’s ‘The Guest House’; Mary Oliver’s ‘Wild Geese’. and Martha Postlethwaite’s ‘Clearing’. I also recommended two books on the Buddha’s ‘heart practices’ of loving-kindness, compassion, joy, and equanimity: Sharon Salzberg’s ‘Loving Kindness: The Revolutionary Art of Happiness’ and Christina Feldman’s ‘Boundless Heart: The Buddha’s Path of Kindness, Compassion, Joy, and Equanimity.’

Insight: Perhaps all the dragons in our.. Rainer Maria Rilke Quotes

Perhaps all the dragons in our.. Rainer Maria Rilke Quotes

additional quotes by Rainer Maria Rilke

Perhaps all the dragons in our.. Rainer Maria Rilke Quotes

Perhaps all the dragons in our.. Rainer Maria Rilke Quotes

and other quotes, thoughts

Eating, too, has been turned away from its true nature: want on the one hand and superfluity on the other have troubled the clarity of this need, and all the profound, simple necessities in which life renews itself have similarly been obscured.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Rilke on terror, courage

 'We must always trust in the difficult...'   What appears to us most alien will become our most trusted experience. 

We have no reason to harbor any mistrust against our world, for its not against us. If it has terrors, they are our terrors. If it has abysses, these abysses belong to us. If there are dangers, we must try to love them, and only if we could arrange our lives in accordance with the principle that tells us that we must always trust in the difficult, then what now appears to us to be alien will become our most intimate and trusted experience.

How could we forget those ancient myths that stand at the beginning of all races – the myths about dragons that at the last moment are transformed into princesses. Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are only princesses waiting for us to act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.

So you must not be frightened if a sadness rises before you larger than any you’ve ever seen, if an anxiety like light and cloud shadows moves over your hands and everything that you do. You must realize that something has happened to you. Life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in its hands and will not let you fall. Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness, any miseries, or any depressions? For after all, you do not know what work these conditions are doing inside you.

'Courage' to realize freedom from suffering...The courage to meet our experience as it is...hwlps us be courageous in our lives...less reliance on our comforts.  more and more open to challenges of life...the Boddhisatva...being commited to awakening...staying in this realm until all beings are free from suffering.

Hugh Byrne (Feb 27, 2022) on Rilke, kindness towards self, overcoming fear with kindness towards self

Summary of Live Session, February 27, 2022: 

"It was good to be with everyone today and hold in our hearts and meditation the people of Ukraine at this extraordinarily difficult time. The theme of our session today was ‘Working Wisely and Kindly with Fear.’ 

I shared that while many people view fear and anger as ‘negative’ emotions, it is more helpful to see them as intelligent, survival-based emotions that allowed our ancestors to respond immediately to threats and be able to survive and pass on their genes. These emotions provide us with helpful information and continue to be necessary and useful to us today—particularly in situations of danger. 

These emotions can get us into trouble when we do not respond to them with awareness and, particularly, when we create fear-based, future scenarios that may never happen, but keep us locked in a fight-or-flight reaction. I used the image of the Zen monk in a cave, who painted a tiger on the wall and was terrified every time he looked at the image of the tiger. We often paint pictures in our minds—sometimes catastrophizing—and then become activated and fearful when we think of the pictures or fears we’ve created ourselves. As Mark Twain reputedly said, ‘My life has been filled with terrible misfortunes, most of which never happened.’ 

So, when fear arises in the mind, rather than getting caught up in thoughts about what might happen, it is wise to stay grounded in our direct experience, particularly bodily feelings and sensations, and, meet them with kindness, letting them come and go. 

Two keys to working with fear are, first, to meet fear with awareness—making space for whatever we’re experiencing, ‘welcoming the guests’—and letting the sensations, feelings, and emotions come and go without resistance or getting lost in thoughts and narratives about the situation. 

The second essential way of working wisely with fear is to bring in the heart—to meet fear with loving-kindness and compassion, rather than with aversion and ‘fearing the fear.’ I shared the Buddhist legend of the origin of the practice of loving-kindness (metta)—of the Buddha giving his followers the practice of metta as an antidote to fear—and Sharon Salzberg’s reflection on the meaning of the story: that loving-kindness can penetrate and dislodge fear, but a heart filled with love and friendliness cannot be overtaken by fear. 

The stories and poems I shared include:

• Rilke’s ‘Letters to a Young Poet’—where he invites his young friend to ‘always trust in the difficult’ and turn towards what we fear: ‘Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage.’ And he adds, ‘Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.’

• Wendell Berry’s poem ‘I go among trees’

• W.B. Yeats, “We can make our minds so like still water that beings gather about us that they may see, it may be, their own images, and so live for a moment with a clearer, perhaps even with a fiercer life because of our quiet.” (‘The Celtic Twilight: Faerie and Folklore’)

• Romain Rolland, ‘There is only one heroism in the world: to see the world as it is, and to love it.’

• Some of Rumi’s ‘The Guest House’, Martha Postlethwaite’s ‘Clearing’, and Mary Oliver’s ending to ‘The Summer Day’—‘Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life.’

Wishing you a safe and open-hearted week ahead. Let us hold the people of Ukraine in our hearts, prayers, and meditation—and do all that we can to support them in this hour of need. See you next Sunday at 9am eastern. Warmly, Hugh 🇺🇦💙 💛 🙏🏻

If it has terrors, they are our terrors -Rilke

~ Arrange our lives to always trust in the difficult.

~ the myths about dragons ...dragons are ultimately transformed into princes...acting with beauty and courage...opening to what is scary or difficult.

opening to whatever is scary...with courage, with kindness

Rilke on th emyth of dragons and transforming the scary into prince.

'this moment without judgment' ~  - Dorothy Hunt

may I be kind to myself....may I accept myself just as I am.

Perhaps everything that frightens us is helpless, wants our kindness ~ Rilke

Romain Roland   https://www.azquotes.com/author/12563-Romain_Rolland

only one true heroism...to see the world as it is, and to love it.

https://whatsmyquote.com/quote/there-is-only-one-heroism-in-the-world-to-see-the-world-as-it-is-and-to-love-it/page/2

Wishing oneself well, to love the world, we  must love ourselves first...lovingkindness and care towards self. Wishing this intention can plant the seeds of possibility... (include the people of Ukraine).

Kindness has no enemy...includes everyone. particularly today the people of Ukraine...even Putin himself. 

This is 'unconditional' ...for all beings.

Wendell Berry - I go among trees...It sings and I hear its song."

Rilke on acceptance, courage, letting go,

https://mind-springs.org/library/rilke-on-acceptance/ 

Letter to a Young Poet

We have no reason to harbour any mistrust against our world,
for it is not against us.
If it has terrors, they are our terrors.
If it has abysses, these abysses belong to us.
If there are dangers, we must try to love them,
and only if we could arrange our lives,
in accordance with the principle that tells us
that we must always trust in the difficult,
then what now appears to us to be alien
will become our most intimate and trusted experience.
How could we forget those ancient myths
that stand at the beginning of all races –
the myths of dragons that at the last moment are transformed into princesses?
Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are only princesses
waiting for us to act, just once,
with beauty and courage.
Perhaps everything that frightens us is,
in its deepest essence,
something helpless that wants our love.
So you must not be frightened if a sadness rises before you
larger than any you’ve ever seen,
if an anxiety like light and cloud shadows
moves over your hands and everything that you do.
Life has not forgotten you.
It holds you in its hands and will not yet you fall.
Why do you want to shut out of your life
any uneasiness, any miseries, or any depressions?
For after all, you do not know what work these conditions are doing inside you.

Rainer Maria Rilke

https://mind-springs.org/library/rilke-on-acceptance/

the Dark Hours of My Being - Rilke

 

The Dark Hours of My Being

By: Rilke

I love the dark hours of my being.
My mind deepens into them.
There I can find, as in old letters,
the days of my life, already lived,
and held like a legend, and understood.

Then the knowing comes: I can open
to another life that’s wide and timeless.

So I am sometimes like a tree
rustling over a gravesite
and making real the dream
of the one its living roots
embrace:

a dream once lost
among sorrows and songs.

Rilke

Rilke on trust and dragons and love

This material quoted from the work of Rainer Maria Rilke  - posted here - was discovered through Hugh Bryne's on Sunday morning presentations on Insight Timer. This first heard on Sunday, May 23, 2021. 

http://www.swans.com/library/art10/xxx108.html

We have no reason to harbor any mistrust against our world, for it is not against us. If it has terrors, they are our terrors; if it has abysses, these abysses belong to us; if there are dangers, we must try to love them. And if only we arrange our life in accordance with the principle which tells us that we must always trust in the difficult, then what now appears to us as the most alien will become our most intimate and trusted experience. How could we forget those ancient myths that stand at the beginning of all races, the myths about dragons that at the last moment are transformed into princesses? Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.

So you mustn't be frightened, dear Mr. Kappus, if a sadness rises in front of you, larger than any you have ever seen; if an anxiety, like light and cloud-shadows, moves over your hands and over everything you do. You must realize that something is happening to you, that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in its hand and will not let you fall. Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness, any misery, any depression, since after all you don't know what work these conditions are doing inside you? Why do you want to persecute yourself with the question of where all this is coming from and where it is going? Since you know, after all, that you are in the midst of transitions and you wished for nothing so much as to change. If there is anything unhealthy in your reactions, just bear in mind that sickness is the means by which an organism frees itself from what is alien; so one must simply help it to be sick, to have its whole sickness and to break out with it, since that is the way it gets better. In you, dear Mr. Kappus, so much is happening now; you must be patient like someone who is sick, and confident like someone who is recovering; for perhaps you are both. And more: you are also the doctor, who has to watch over himself. But in every sickness there are many days when the doctor can do nothing but wait. And that is what you, insofar as you are your own doctor, must now do, more than anything else.

“We have no reason to mistrust our world, for it is not against us. If it has it terrors, they are our terrors; if it has abysses, those abysses belong to us; if there are dangers at hand, we must try to love them… How should we be able to forget those ancient myths about dragons that at the least moment turn into princesses; perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave.”

― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

Entrance - Rilke

"Entrance" - a poem by Ranier Maria Rilke

Whoever you are: in the evening step out
of your room, where you know everything;
yours is the last house before the far-off:
whoever you are.
With your eyes, which in their weariness
barely free themselves from the worn-out threshold,
you lift very slowly one black tree
and place it against the sky: slender, alone.
And you have made the world. And it is huge
and like a word which grows ripe in silence.
And as your will seizes on its meaning,
tenderly your eyes let it go. . .

Translated From The German By Edward Snow

From America’s Favorite Poems: A Favorite Poem Project Anthology, edited by Robert Pinsky and Maggie Dietz (W.W. Norton: 328 pp,)

I hold this to be the highest task f...

I hold this to be the highest task for a bond between two people: that each protects the solitude of the other. ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

There is only one journey: going inside yourself. ~ R.M. Rilke

Love consists in this, that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other. ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

this is incredibly hard most of the time. The 'this' is the sitting down and trying to be 'aware' of what is passing before me in that torrent of thought. What passes i no front of me in that cascade of thought.

I have faith that just 'being aware of the questions' (Rilke) I will eventually live into the answers; at least that is the hope.