The following are messages posted to my Facebook friends last week, additions and after thoughts will follow in the next blog.
4 days of poetry in the Lecrin Valley, 7th - 11th April, surrounded by orange and lemon trees. Will I be able to stay the pace ?
The landscape was cloaked in mist most of the time I was there. Another metaphor for not really being clear why I had come. Why was I so irresistibly drawn there? I couldn’t answer that questions, but Rainer Maria Rilke could !
‘Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them. It is a question of experiencing everything. At present you need to live the question. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day.’
Our teacher, American Mark Burrows, is a professor and a scholar of medieval Christianity with a particular interest in mysticism and poetry. Of course he is much more than any of these labels.
He is a wonderful holy mixture of extraordinary intuition , huge intelligence, incredible teaching/people skills- the absolute opposite of my ex- oncologist- and a person who delved deep to help each one of us find our personal sacred meaning in every metaphor he paused us to consider.
Rilke’s poetry is astonishing. It’s full of extraordinary metaphors that take us on journeys into the subconscious world of forgotten dreams, yearnings , heartbreaks, always (?) with a direct link to the
God of his understanding. For Rilke, God was a God of New Beginnings, a ‘Quirky God.’
How I love this metaphor.
The poetry retreat ended this afternoon. For 5 days I felt led into a new land… a brief visit into to the extraordinary inner world of Rilke.
I want to go back !
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