TATV GRAL

“So don’t be frightened, dear friend, if a sadness confronts you larger than any you have ever known, casting its shadow over all that you do.
You must think that something is happening within you, something that is still becoming.

Life has not forgotten you.
It holds you in its hand and will not let you fall.
Why would it need you otherwise?

Ask yourself whether your former life has not withdrawn from you, whether it has not become poor.

Why do you want to exclude, drive out, or lose your states of depression,
since you do not know what work they are doing in you?
Why do you want to persecute your troubles as though they were enemies,
when they are perhaps the things that most deeply teach you?

So be patient with everything that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves,
like locked rooms and like books 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.”

From Letters to a Young Poet, Letter VIII (Dec 19, 1903), by Rainer Maria Rilke

Caspar David Friedrich
Monk by the Sea (Der Mönch am Meer)
Year: 1808–1810
Medium: Oil on canvas

Reading Navaho Symbols of Healing while spending time on Ojibwe land this week.
Letting the pines, the quiet water, and the cold air slow everything down.
Grateful to be in a place where the land teaches simply by being itself.
🌲✨