Spring Rilke Circle: What does it mean to be human?
A monthly call where living with a perennial question meets embodied speaking and listening.
Over the years, I’ve re-read Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letter to a Young Poet numerous times. While I’m no longer young and never aspired to becoming a poet, I continue to relish his writing and counsel.
“Let me just advise you to allow your unfolding to happen. You couldn’t disturb it more than by looking outward for answers to questions that, perhaps, can only be answered by your innermost feelings and your most private hours.”
In this spirit, to love and live the questions, please let the Spring’s question—What does it mean to be human? accompany you, and listen for the answers that arise from your direct experience.
If you want to join others who are living with this question, participate in our monthly Rilke Circle this Spring. Rilke Circles are a playing field for embodied presence that welcomes gesture, shared silence, and all our senses.
Enjoy the Spring’s quotes from Rilke.
White Roses
“Every day, on contemplating these exquisite white roses, I wonder if they are not the perfect image of the unity of being and non-being in our lives. That, I would say, constitutes the fundamental question of our existence.”
— Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to Madame M-R, January 4, 1923
What Kind of Courage is Required of Us?
“What kind of courage is required of us?
Imagine a person taken out of his room, and without preparation or transition placed on the heights of a great mountain range. He would feel an unparalleled insecurity, an almost annihilating abandonment to the nameless. He would feel he was falling into outer space or shattering into a thousand pieces. What enormous lie would his brain concoct in order to give meaning to this and validate his senses? In such a way do all measures and distances change for the one who realizes his solitude. These changes are often sudden and, as with the person on the mountain peak, bring strange feelings and fantasies that are almost unbearable. But it is necessary for us to experience that too. We must also accept our reality in all its immensity. Everything, even the unheard of, must be possible within it. This is, in the end, the only kind of courage that is required of us: the courage to meet the strangest, most awesome, and most inexplicable of phenomena.”
— Rainer Maria Rilke, Borgeby gärd, Sweden, August 12, 1904, Letters to a Young Poet
Our next Rilke Circle is March 19th, 12-12:50 PST. Participants share their direct lived experience of a response to this question.
While Rilke Circles are reserved for paid subscribers, I’m happy to gift a free month if you’re curious to experience it. Direct message me and I’ll share the Zoom link to register. Here’s optional reading that provides more details on the purpose, agenda and roles for the call, as well as a video introduction.
Paid subscribers, you’ll find the link to register here for our Zoom call March 19th. Note, advanced registration is required.