Threads on letting things be
There are times to let things be, and times to take action. Wisdom lies in discerning which is which.
This type of post is something I’m calling “Threads.” These are going to be short posts that share relatively undeveloped thoughts - they might consist of a quote (or two, or three), or kernels of ideas that have been bouncing around in my head.
As readers, you have a choice as to how you interact with these posts - you can simply let them nestle in your consciousness as nuggets of insight, or you can “pull on the thread” (either by mulling them over further, asking related questions, or by going to the source of the quote and investigating) and go a ways down the rabbit hole to which they lead.
Feel free to share your own mullings-over in the comments for my and other readers’ benefit!
David Whyte, commenting on his own poem, “Winter of Listening”:
“Within this poem is an ancient intuitive understanding of winter as a time to leave things alone, to let things remain hidden, even to themselves. A time when to name anything would be to give it the wrong name, most especially refusing to name ourselves, a radical sense of letting ourselves alone, without even the most subtle, internal self-bullying or coercion. It is the intimate experience in sitting alone by a fire, in silence and in reverie, with both a simplification and a growing clairvoyance of what is just beginning to be made known.”
Rainer Maria Rilke, in Letters to a Young Poet:
“I want to beg you…to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
King Solomon of ancient Israel, in Ecclesiastes 3:1-8:
There’s a season for everything, and a time for every matter under the heavens: a time for giving birth and a time for dying, a time for planting and a time for uprooting what was planted, a time for killing and a time for healing, a time for tearing down and a time for building up, a time for crying and a time for laughing, a time for mourning and a time for dancing, a time for throwing stones and a time for gathering stones, a time for embracing and a time for avoiding embraces, a time for searching and a time for losing, a time for keeping and a time for throwing away, a time for tearing and a time for repairing, a time for keeping silent and a time for speaking, a time for loving and a time for hating, a time for war and a time for peace.