in the wind weekly #3
My dearest friends,
It’s been a long week. Tuesday felt like Thursday and the days kept rolling. I write from a bar in a strange small town not far from the one I’ve been calling home. Who’s to say how I really ended up here, but it’s a most welcome change of place.
“Strawberry Wine” by Agela Hacker plays in the background a bit too loud while cans crack and the space fills up with an unfamiliar crowd. I’ve no doubt that the atmosphere will impact the following words, so please, bear with me if you care to. Thank you for being here.
a snow field on a high alpine pass
There’s a lot that I want to write and not much that I think I have the space for in this format. Life’s been a bit chaotic, so, as I take a moment to pause and reflect, I find myself siting in gratitude for the friends and community that I have been welcoming into in this area and a curious longing to know what is waiting for me just down the road.
I think a lot about what it means to live in a society that seems so greatly influenced by short-form media and my own internal pull to create something(s) that might actually make a difference. So, as I write this letter, I hope that for even just one of you this can bring something that impacts you positively on this fine and blustery Saturday, or whatever weather greets you when you next walk outside.
After a two-week deep dive into Cal Newport, I felt the inspiration to return to a lesser talked about book of poetry-philosophy called “Letters to a Young Poet,” a collection of letters from the Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke. This week’s reading undoubtedly explains the headspace that I find myself in now.
The first time that this book crossed my path was back when I was fifteen. Starting my existential journey early in my youth, one of my high school advisers gifted me this short set of ten letters. I want to say that at the time I didn’t think much of it, but it was, in reality, a very important moment of consciousness.
It was a starting point of thinking critically and reflecting deeply, around the same time where he encouraged me to “Just go sit on a rock. For a while. And think.” A very unique way to encourage someone to dive into meditation and Eastern belief systems, but it sure hit the right chord in me at the time. This was also around when I first began a journey in the written word and what it meant to write honestly and create a space to feel deeply.
In these letters, a young Franz Kappus, an aspiring writer, began a correspondence to the established author. Translated from German, this book is one that I’ve returned to again and again, at so many points in time. More years than not I return to this book and find myself in this similar reflective headspace.
The wisdom that Rilke attempts to distill in such a short amount of pages, woven into suggestions for further readings and explanations as to why so much time has passed between responses creates a dissonance between feeling as though he is speaking to me, as the reader, and the true recipient, another aspiring artist who most have probably never heard of. These letters, to my knowledge, were not intended to be published.
I think that this book continues to be curious to me because the two main themes have always seemed in direct conflict to me. These themes encapsulate such a core conflict inside of me. The dire balance between fully participating in life and falling into states of deep reflection. And knowing how to play, push, and pull between these states of mind.
Rilke writes, “Going-into-oneself and for hours meeting no one- this one must be able to attain. To be solitary, the way one was solitary as a child when the grownups went around involved with things that seemed important and big because they looked so busy and because one comprehended nothing of their doings.”
While simultaneously saying to Kappus, “I want to beg you, as much as I can, dear sir, to be patient toward all that is unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything now. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
Do you see how these two truths might be held at once? It took me a while, but I think I know how to now.
It’s funny reading it again now. After much time spent in the former headspace, cultivating the ability to find comfort in solitude over the past few years- maybe to a point of the extreme, with multiple 10 day meditations under my belt. And as the little fierce dragons of my mind rear their heads, I now remind myself that while I am not my thoughts, I can still take notes from them and my emotions to adjust the way I am living so that I might be a few degrees more aligned with where I am trying to go and how I am living my day to day life.
And to understand that maybe for quite a long time I was asking the wrong questions in that deeper contemplation. As my heart has a plentitude of the “unresolved,” and that it can be possible to love all of the question without searching for the answers, as difficult as it be to live in uncertainty. To love the chaos and know that down the road I will drop back into reflection and all of the decisions that I made and all of the questions that fueled me in the direction that I went will have their own curious, unique answers. Building time into my day to reflect and ask the questions that do matter. Questions of less existential nature and more practically significant.
“Patience,” Rilke writes, “is everything!”
And so the pendulum swings. Back into the chaos of figuring it all out and trying to make sense of the desire to merge creation and business and create some form of sustainable future for myself.
So that in five years, I will look back and know deeply that I did everything that I could have done. And in that moment, and ten, twenty, thirty years from this moment, I will have lived into all of the answers to the questions that pull at my heart.
So, to conclude a philosophical ramble of a letter, that may or may not have relevance to anything in particular, I will leave one last, particularly moving concept that Rilke presents as he says, “There is only one single way. Go into yourself. Search out the reason that bids you write; find out whether it is spreading out its roots in the deepest places of your heart, acknowledge to yourself whether you would have to die if it were denied you to write.”
And I beg you to consider what your “writing” is, as you can substitute any form of creativity for this. More and more every day I feel the strongest draw yet to create something. Anything really, that can cultivate positive change in communities.
I have no idea if any of this will matter many years from now. But maybe it can matter in this moment, right now. And these feelings, I think, are the roots that have grown and claimed home in the deepest places of my own heart, a garden I deeply love and find beauty within.
So, I will leave you with that question: What is it that has spread it’s roots in the deepest places of your own heart?
And maybe it’s not a life or death situation, but in something that you wouldn’t want to live without. Maybe it’s hopelessly romantic of me, but I wonder if we all have something like that.
Or maybe it’s all bullshit and I am just grasping for a sense of meaning in the chaos. I guess that’s a choice of belief that we all get the chance to experiment with. Who am I to say?
Deep breaths, my friends. The Spring seems right around the corner and with it will bring days of warmth against exposed skin while cool breezes bring a chill of Winter rememberance. As the environment expands from it’s frozen slumber, I hope that you all can expand with it.
As always, thank you for being here, now.
w/ metta,
Sage
Music Recommendations:
“Glass Half Full of Tears” by Brad Stank: https://open.spotify.com/track/49Y3nPGA0cSptxZdxryoNO?si=be2d6d4106634028
“Tunnel” by Polo & Pan, Channel Tres": https://open.spotify.com/track/4at0npP4QkdIUulFZIsYft?si=7cbf6018ac1c4bf7
“Home” by Manahan Street Band: https://open.spotify.com/track/4iJHLZlgoX6CnQ499m1Dyr?si=d312e2f1406c4cbc
“Kilby Girl” by the Backseat Lovers: https://open.spotify.com/track/1170VohRSx6GwE6QDCHPPH?si=a9b46c5b2cfb40d4
“Tioga Pass ft. Rocco Palladino” by Yussef Dayes, Rocco Palladino: https://open.spotify.com/track/5OrpMZeYktAdLSDbsdC6Kc?si=4b9ce127cbeb4bf5
