To live everything

Few years ago, a friend asked me to consider the words below.

It has taken me a while to finally understand them and myself. 

   „I beg you, 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.”

 

(Rainer Maria Rilke’s 1903, Letters to a Young Poet)

A brief moment...

Their heart we do not know

Fish never tire of water; no one other than a fish knows their heart. 

Birds love the woods; no one other than a bird knows their heart. 

The same is true of those who savor reclusion.

(Kamo no Chomei, Tr. David Barnhill)

 

 

*The title of this post is a line from Bashō, the Japanese poet. 

I thank Michael Tweed for sharing the beautiful lines from Kamo no Chomei on Roxana Ghita's blog. 

And, it goes without saying, Roxana's post has been inspiring. 

The only difference is that my fish has no name yet.

Summer windows

Remembering the loved ones

Autumn symphony

 

 

Fearful symmetry

In the deep blue

I have been here before

          

          I have been here before,

              But when or how I cannot tell:

          I know the grass beyond the door,

              The sweet keen smell,

    The sighing sound, the lights around the shore.

          You have been mine before,—

              How long ago I may not know:

          But just when at that swallow's soar

              Your neck turned so,

    Some veil did fall,—I knew it all of yore.

          Has this been thus before?

              And shall not thus time's eddying flight

          Still with our lives our love restore

              In death's despite,

    And day and night yield one delight once more?

 (Sudden Light, Dante Gabriel Rossetti)

To be blunt and sentimental

I have been here before, I have done this another time, repeated the same gestures, pressed the same keys on the keyboard.  

I have even written these words. The blog that I am starting today has been hunting me for a year now, with an intensity

that almost bothered my day-to-day repeated actions.

And then, when time came, I started thinking of its appearance as one thinks of the things that bring joy. What colors to use, 

what words to write, what shape to give to all the incoming thoughts, all the unprocessed photos and all those travelled 

and travelled once more roads. It then occurred to me that beauty is simple and repetitive, that we all see the same things, 

albeit with different eyes and record them with different cameras. It is this beauty of repetition that has convinced me to start.