Daily Nourishment for May 28: Give Oxygen to the Unsaid and Unsayable
Daily Nourishment Read Time: 40 seconds
Pause/Prompt/Practice Time: 10-15 minutes
“Asking questions can invite that which is in the shadows to come into the light. Questions pry open spaces where certainty had been suffocating imagination, giving oxygen to the unsaid and the unsayable.”
-Charlotte Donlon, Spiritual Direction for Writers: Everyday Rituals for Your Writing Life
Pause.
While looking at the painting below, take three deep breaths using the questions from the painting’s title as a breath prayer or breath meditation. Hold the first question in your mind and soul for a full inhale and exhale: Where do we come from?
Then inhale and exhale with the second question: What are we?
Then inhale and exhale with the third question: Where are we going?
Paul Gauguin
Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?
1897–1898
Prompt.
Read the quote below two or three times.
“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?
Preorder and read Spiritual Direction for Writers: Everyday Rituals for the Writing Life
And
Read more 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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Flourish Anyway with Rhythms, Rituals, & Retreats
Today’s Daily Nourishment was provided by Charlotte Donlon.
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