Todays recommendation is Rilke’s „Letters to a young poet“ one of the most beautiful and important text one can read. Only a few years ago I discovered these lines:

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and
try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and
like books that are now 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.
Live the questions now.
Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it,
live along some distant day into the answer.”

I thought first they are a poem, but they are lines out of a letter that Rilke wrote in 1904 in his correspondence with a 19-year-old cadet and budding poet named Franz Xaver Kappus. I discovered them on Birgit’s blog „Sätze und Schätze“ and it started a Rilke wildfire in me ; )

I got a friend of mine, the wonderful calligraph artist Sandra from „The Art of confusion„, to design a special Rilke star for me and I had to buy a book of his poetry of course. It’s beautiful, right?

Do yourself a favour and dig into some Rilke today. It’s his birthday and how better to celebrate the life of this wonderful sensitive artist then by reading some of his poems.

Maybe you would like to compliment your Rilke wildfire with some of the soothing poems by Sylvia Plath in her collection „Crossing the water“/Übers Wasser„.

I would love to know your favorite poem – will you leave it here for me? German or English both is fine 🙂