“GO WITHIN”

Occasionally, some have asked, “How do you know what to write about?” After flashing a smile, my response has varied over time. Sometimes, I know exactly what I want to explore, as there has been a stirring in my heart or mind. Over the years, I have shifted from a restless and probing mindset to paying more attention to my heart. Now, I focus on bringing my whole self into the process, including the soul’s treasures, abyss, and emotions. Sometimes, just one word or phrase is enough to trigger something deep within me. More often than not, I do not know where or how my thoughts will evolve as I write. I simply let them flow, making minor edits. The next day, I returned to read it as if someone else had written it. What has become important and precious to me is that I pay attention to myself, the world around me, and God’s presence and actions.

The other day, the book I was reading featured a simple quote from Rainer Maria Rilke, The Letters to a Young Poet, which I had read cursorily before. I went back and read through a small book. This time, I read as if I were a young poet whom Rilke was addressing. The letters came alive, and I highlighted what spoke to me. This post is far from being a research paper; rather, it is a reflection based on my current life journey. First off, Rilke was only 27 years old, corresponding with a budding 19-year-old poet for almost six years, comprising ten letters total. The “young” Rilke was speaking to an old “young” poet within me. 

Unapologetically, Rilke’s overwhelming and overarching advice to a young poet was to “Go within,” or “Go into yourself” (in other translations). Rilke often wrote about solitude, what he calls “the vast inner solitude,” the necessary part of it, the trouble, sadness, and doubt. He advises embracing doubt as an intimate friend. He does not sugarcoat the dark and challenging aspects of solitude. In the Eighth Letter (out of Ten Letters total), Rilke lucidly and powerfully sums up, “We are solitary” and “fundamentally this is nothing that one can choose or refrain from.”

Rilke famously writes in an earlier letter.

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. 

For Rilke, loving and living the questions was part and parcel with being in solitude. Rilke wisely advised the young poet to be patient, not rushing to get out of the desert-ness of solitude and loneliness of silence.

Rilke associated poetry and the greater art with solitude. “Works of art are of an infinite solitude, and no means of approach is so useless as criticism. Only love can touch and hold them and be fair to them.” Perhaps in Rilke’s mind, he preached patience because he believed in love, that “love can touch and hold them.” In the Ninth Letter, Rilke wished         

that you may find in yourself enough patience to endure and enough simplicity to have faith; that you may gain more and more confidence in what is difficult and in your solitude among other people. And as for the rest, let life happen to you. Believe me: life is in the right, always.

One other gem of Rilke’s insight I took away this time, which I did not see before, was his appreciation for nature.

Then draw near to Nature. Then, as if no one had ever tried before, try to say what you see and feel and love and lose.

If you trust in Nature, in what is simple 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.

I felt like Rilke was inviting me to pen the divine details of nature as if people are reading for the first time. For that matter, I should write everything as if I am the only one who can put it into writing. I take this far from being arrogant, but out of a sense of stewardship for sacredness. As others steward what is given to them, I, too, am invited to do my part. As there is divinity in nature, there is also divinity in everything. Along this line, he encourages the young poet in the First Letter to

write about what your everyday life offers you; describe your sorrows and desires, the thoughts that pass through your mind and your belief in some kind of beauty. Describe all these with heartfelt, silent, humble sincerity and, when you express yourself, use the Things around you, the images from your dreams, and the objects that you remember. 

“Go into yourself” and “draw near to Nature” must not be viewed as exhortations to conveniently retreat from the world; rather, they are indispensable bridges to engage with the world around us. Both require generous and hospitable space as well as honest and tender hearts.