About This Song: (Lyrics Below)
A book that has had a repeatedly profound effect upon my life since I first read it as a teenager is”Letters To A Young Poet” by R.M. Rilke. In it Rilke exhorts the young poet who had written to him asking for advice, to “love the questions themselves…”
Here’s the full quote:
I beg you…to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually without ever noticing it, live your way into the answer…
– Rainer Maria Rilke
When I was younger, I had so much frantic, frenetic, urgent, desperate drive and desire to share my music with people… But I kept getting blocked, and stopped and shut down and I couldn’t understand why. It seemed unfair and I gobbled up the idea of being a “victim” like it was breakfast cereal “consumed at odd hours of the night…”
Rilke’s guidance steadied me and allowed me to focus on writing for the sake of writing, not to please or impress other people. Writing as best I can in order to be true to my calling rather than in order to “get famous”. Rilke wrote to the young poet, essentially the best advice anyone could give about creative arts. To paraphrase, he said, “Hey if you are writing true to your deepest self, then it would never occur to you to ask someone else if your verses are any good or not…” So that’s what has guided me for 4 decades.
Eventually though as an artist, musician, author or poet, we do need to get our work out into the world where it can do some good for others. But to do so from a place of non-attachment and grace is far more satisfying…
This song has gone through many revisions. This last one feels good for the moment. Can’t promise it won’t show up differently in the future but here is where it is as of this moment…
Living With The Questions
| Song # 461 [Song # 302 revised] | 9/28/1998 revised 1/28/2013
There’s an old Grey moon above us. There’s a city down below
There’s a secret that I’ll never tell because I don’t yet know…
We’ve got beads of expectation standing out upon our skins
We’ve got Sirens in the deep of night to notify the next of kin…
That we’ve left in search of answers to the questions locked like doors
Someday we may dare live into the truth that beckons from the farthest shore…
Refrain:
I’m living with the questions
I’m seeing things I’ve never seen before
I’m searching for the Truth
Digging right down to the roots
Maybe that’s what life is for…
There’s a telephone invading with its shrill and jangled news
But I am concentrating on holding my own tune
Sometimes I feel like I’m haunted by the questions from my past
Sometimes it seems like there’s an answer in just loving what is asked…
Refrain:
Some say the answer’s in the desert and there’s power there for sure
Where the sky goes on forever and the Spirit opens doors…
There’s a difference between illusion and what is magical and true
In the blessing of confusion will the wisdom you seek find you?
Refrain:
Copyright 1998-2013 by Mark Shepard.
Photo: Copyright: rolffimages / 123RF Stock Photo
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