Daily Nourishment for August 16, 2024: Go into Yourself
Daily Nourishment Read Time: 40 seconds
Pause/Prompt/Practice Time: 13 minutes
“Delve into yourself for a deep answer.” - Rainer Maria Rilke
Pause.
Take six deep breaths with a six-count inhale and a six-count exhale.
Prompt.
Read the quote below. Then reread it. Read it one more time aloud.
“I ask you, dear sir, to have patience with all that is unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves, like closed rooms, like books written in a foreign language.
Don’t try to find the answers now. They cannot be given anyway, because you would not be able to live them. For everything is to be lived.
Live the questions now. Perhaps you then may gradually, without noticing, one day in the future, live into the answers. Perhaps you bear within yourself the capacity to imagine and shape a sacred way of life. Prepare yourself for that. Trust what comes to you.”
- Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy
Practice.
Journal, take notes, or begin writing a new poem, story, or essay using the quote above and the questions below.
—Which questions do you want answers to right now?
—Which questions do you want to ignore?
—What might it look like to live your questions instead of finding answers to them? What would you do differently today? Tomorrow? Next week?
—What sacred way of life do you want to shape? What would you let go of? What would you hold onto?
Want More?
Read this from Rilke on the writing life from Letters to a Young Poet:
“There is only one single way. Go into yourself. Search for the reason that bids you write; find out whether it is spreading out its roots in the deepest places of your heart, acknowledge to yourself whether you would have to die if it were denied you to write. This above all-ask yourself in the stillest hour of your night: must I write? Delve into yourself for a deep answer. And if this should be affirmative, if you may meet this earnest question with a strong and simple ‘I must,’ then build your life according to this necessity; your life even into its most indifferent and slightest hour must be a sign of this urge and a testimony to it.”
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Upcoming Workshops & Gatherings
—The August Co-Writing Schedule is live.
—Spiritual Direction for Writers® + Enneagram for Creativity Gathering will take place on Friday, September 27th and Saturday, September 28th. Recordings will be available if you can’t join us live. You can register here.
August 31— Online Revision Stations Designed by Lauren F. Winner
Today’s Daily Nourishment was provided by Charlotte Donlon.
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