snowy woods and Rilke

I went snowshoeing yesterday in the woods. There is a stillness about winter which always catches my breath, suddenly everything is quieter, seems more solitary, more thoughtful. Black branches of trees were frosted over in white snow, draping over the frozen ground. The sky; grey too, and wings of black birds crossed over it at unexpected intervals, interrupting the stillness. All the colours are muted, the river is silenced by it's covering of ice and snow. Then I read later the thoughts of Rainer Maria Rilke, which so often impress me.

He writes to a young poet who is seeking a mentor, someone who will advise him. These letters were written over a span of 5 years. Written from Rome, Italy, Paris, Sweden... what comes out of Rilke's pen as he corresponds with this man is poignant, beautiful, wise...here is a taste from "Letters to a Young Poet":

"If you will cling to nature, to the simple in nature, to the little things that hardly anyone sees, and that can so unexpectedly become big and beyond measuring; if you have this love of inconsiderable things and seek quite simply, as one who serves, to win the confidence of what seems poor: then everything will become easier, more coherent and somehow more conciliatory for you. You are so young, so before all beginning, and I want to beg you, as much as I can, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to 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. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day to the answer."

"Your life, of which I think with so many wishes. Do you remember how that life yearned out of its childhood for the "great"? I see that it is now going on beyond the great to long for greater. For this reason it will not cease to be difficult, but for this reason too it will not cease to grow."

"So you must not be frightened, if a sadness rises up before you larger than any you have ever seen; if a restiveness, like light and cloud-shadows, passes over your hands and over all you do. You must think that something is happening with you, that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in its hand; it will not let you fall."