The Walk by Rainer Maria Rilke

My eyes already touch the sunny hill,
going far ahead of the road I have begun.
So we are grasped by what we cannot grasp;
it has its inner light, even from a distance –

and changes us, even if we do not reach it,
into something else, which, hardly sensing it, we already are;
a gesture waves us on, answering our own wave …
but what we feel is the wind in our faces.

Reassurance, by Alice Walker (from “In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens”)

I must love the questions

themselves

as Rilke said

like locked rooms

full of treasure

to which my blind

and groping key

does not yet fit.

and await the answers

as unsealed

letters

mailed with dubious intent

and written in a very foreign

tongue.

and in the hourly making

of myself

no thought of Time

to force, to squeeze

the space

I grow into.

A friend of mine brought this poem to my attention when I was having a lot of questions about death, and the afterlife, and you know, all those big-world burning questions that we quickly, quietly tuck away when their noise becomes too big. I remember opening the email, months after she promised me this vague poetic memory, and being stunned by its brief, perfect words that communicate both the questions and the answers simultaneously. I find comfort in knowing that all of us, if we ever choose to engage with our more spiritual, vulnerable sides, arrive at the same questions, have the same anxieties, the same yearnings.

Bless all the poets, bringing us some of that sweet, sweet elusive peace.