To live the question

A young friend and I exchange letters.

Who are you today? we ask ourselves and each other. Our answers come in fits and starts. Long pauses. Weeks of delay and churning uncertainty.

I am grateful for the examination. Appreciating the lack of a fixed reply, I applaud her search. Answers do arrive, I tell her (and myself), in letters, books, in shifts of illumination when we are not looking. Last night, for example, I landed on this passage:

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 can not 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.

— Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

November light

Something about November makes me sad in a not-so-awful way. It's the long-goodbye light that casts everything— from water to mood — in a tender, ending sad.

The garden is forgotten

in November’s thin light. Shadows yawn

sad and I am surrounded by things we

covet, yet forget:

sunflowers, a tomato’s full curve, the snap

of carrots — wilted from a rigored season.

Now tomatoes lie bruised, sunflowers quiet

and leggy. Even the crabgrass is worn with

effort. Something inside me swells in

this frail autumn glow. I don’t know if

it is fatigue or forever.

— From Forecast, a word-art collaboration featuring poems by Drew Myron and interpretive paintings by Tracy Weil. Special Edition Exhibition Book and prints are available at www.weilworks.com/forecast.

The Art of Elimination

Kick off the weekend with a Newspaper Blackout Poem poem by writer-designer-cartoonist Austin Kleon. I can't wait for his book, scheduled for release in April 2010.

oregon autumn

October Collusion

in this slowing season

tree, rain and soil conspire

earth, damp and clammy

invites river to rush

fern dashes past ivy while

shore pine and hemlock

reach in whispered light

plot to enter winter's

dark wetness

coiled and snug

— Drew Myron

Lost & Found

Sometimes a book keeps coming back. You read it once, love it, pass it on or set it aside. Years later, it resurfaces on your friend's kitchen counter or in the doctor's office. You are flushed with memory and love. You invite it in, hope that it holds the same allure.

Fifteen years ago, in a season of serious illness, crushing love and profound sadness, I found solace in a beautiful book passage. I made copies, pasted the words in my journal and read them again and again. I wrapped myself in the comfort of clarity, if even for just moments at a time.

Last week, I loaded up for winter reading. As daylight wanes my reading time lengthens. At the used bookstore in town (Mari's Books, a closet-size shop packed with unexpected gems) I filled my arms with new material. Just before leaving, I spotted the book that made me feel less alone so many years ago. I embraced the book like an old friend, dashed home, pawed through pages and found my favorite passage once again.

Tears

You never know what may cause them. The sight of the Atlantic Ocean can do it, or a piece of music, or a face you’ve never seen before. A pair of somebody’s old shoes can do it. Almost any movie made before the great sadness that came over the world after the Second World War, a horse cantering across a meadow, the high school basketball team running out onto the gym floor at the start of a game. You can never be sure. But of this you can be sure. Whenever you find tears in your eyes, especially unexpected tears, it is well to pay the closest attention.

They are not only telling you something about the secret of who you are, but more often than not God is speaking to you through them of the mystery of where you have come from and is summoning you to where, if your soul is to be saved, you should go next.

— Frederick Buechner, from Listening to Your Life