after Rilke

Let everything happen to you:
Beauty and terror
Just keep going
No feeling is final
― Rainer Maria Rilke

We picnicked in the park and watched Manhattan
Succumb to dusk, witnessed the fairy lights of the bridge 
Blink on and the skyscraper stars crest the horizon 
We played with each other’s hair and laughed against the cold
I have never been loved like this 
As we left I snapped a picture of the sunset-gilded sailboat
And wrote: in the midst of so much hard 
You get moments like this 
We walked home to hospitals and emergency plans 
Grieving the dead and the dying and the blisteringly broken 
Is this life, as they said it to be: beauty 
And terror? The wheat and the weeds so heaped together 
That the only response is to dance before the lord of the harvest 
And wait for his wind to sow new seeds?

my photo

At the end of the marvelous movie Jojo Rabbit, that quote from Rilke hangs on a black screen before the credits roll. I can’t say much for fear of spoiling the movie (which, if you haven’t seen it yet, you must drop everything and go watch), but it perfectly captures the emotional arc of the story, and it always makes me cry.

Rainer Maria Rilke, as you may know, was an Austrian poet whose life straddled the turn of the twentieth century. A confession: I have not read a full compilation of his works, nor even several poems. Just a couple. His Book of Hours and Letters to a Young Poet are high on my list. But I have read the full poem this quote is from, and it's worth sharing here. It’s called “Go to the Limits of Your Longing”:

God speaks to each of us as he makes us,
then walks with us silently out of the night.

These are the words we dimly hear:

You, sent out beyond your recall,
go to the limits of your longing.
Embody me.

Flare up like a flame
and make big shadows I can move in.

Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.
Don’t let yourself lose me.

Nearby is the country they call life.
You will know it by its seriousness.

Give me your hand.

Once, at the bitter end of 2020 when my college roommates were scattering to their respective homes for Christmas break, leaving me alone in our one-bedroom apartment on the edge of Manhattan because international border restrictions prevented me from visiting my family, one roommate left me a note on my desk. She included that stanza: Let everything happen to you…No feeling is final.

So much of my learning in these years of young adulthood has been a reckoning of the tensions of life that strain at us like magnetic poles. Deep roots and wide wings. Open arms and firm boundaries. Routines and spontaneity. Ambition and contentment. Sabbath and work. Justice and mercy. Grace and truth.

Beauty and terror.

And the thread holding it all together, it is becoming clear to me, is relationship—the three-person’d God at the heart of everything whose dance of love spills over into our human relationships.

When you’re trying to hold on to competing values, one in each hand, you’ll tear in half. We use that image of holding a lot, “holding things in tension” or “holding two ideas together.”

But our hands aren’t made to hold on to ideas. They’re made to hold on to each other.

What if instead of trying to fit your fingers around paradoxes and perplexities, you took someone else’s hand? And then together you wade through the ambiguities and seeming contradictions, each supporting the other as the ground gets swampy or shaky or hard, because these tensions are made to be breathed in and out, to be walked through, to be lived, not to be held and controlled by our frail hands.

It makes me think of one of my other favorite movies—my for-real, top-of-the-list favorite movie—A Hidden Life. Like Jojo Rabbit, it’s set against the backdrop of Nazi Germany, and the end also makes me cry every time. In the closing moments, one of the characters muses over edenic shots of the Austrian Alps:

A time will come when we know what all this is for. And there will be no mysteries. We will know why…we live. We’ll come together. We'll plant orchards. Fields. We’ll build the land back up. 

I long for that day. Unanswered questions so often hold more terror than beauty for me, but without them, would I ever reach out for someone else’s hand?

A time will come when we know what all this is for.

Until then, we hold onto each other against and through the mystery of life. We discover, against pain and the terrible unknowns, the sharp oxygen of love.

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In Other Words…

Goodreads reviews:

One of the delightful things this year has been reading through Pierce Brown’s Red Rising sci-fi series. It's been a while since I've been engrossed in a new world like this, and oh, I’ve missed that all-absorbing excitement. He blends classical references from literature and mythology with Brandon Sanderson-level world-building, mind-bending politics, agonizing moral dilemmas, all the science-y/tech cleverness you want from sci-fi, and powerful character arcs. I can't recommend it enough, and I am desperately awaiting the final book’s release.

Iron Gold (5 stars) | Dark Age (4 stars) | Light Bringer (4.5 stars)

I also highly recommend these two non-fiction books, dealing with very different topics but both rewiring my brain in the best ways:

The Home of God by Miroslov Volf and Ryan McAnnally-Linz (4 stars) | The Art of Gathering by Priya Parker (4.5 stars)

Thank you as always for being here. May the end of your Julys be as sweet and satisfying as a perfectly ripe peach.

to staying awake,

Aberdeen