June 20th, 2026

~ I believe in life — not the life that fills our days, but the other one ~ the life of small things, of animals, of the great plains ~

As I've been exploring my fractured relationship with my father, and the misplaced projections that followed onto my brother, I find myself drawn to two movements in Rilke. Together, they hold the emotional darkness, the pain of hidden truths, and the opening toward redemption.

Rilke's Eighth Duino Elegy in fulll

On the Eighth Elegy

The animal looks into the Open, unafraid. I do not. I am always positioned facing backward — toward what's already shaped, already lost — never toward what waits ahead. Rilke names this our particular wound: not blindness to the future, but a life built with its back turned to it.

~ the animal looks into the Open, unafraid ~

~ I have always faced backward ~

~ seeing what was shaped, what was lost ~

~ never what waits ahead ~

~ this is the wound Rilke names ~

~ a life built with its back turned to what's ahead ~

This isn't comfort — it's diagnosis. The misplaced projection I'm working through is, in these terms, a facing of the wrong direction: a life oriented toward an absence (my father), asking someone who was never that absence (Bill) to stand in the gap.

On Letters to a Young Poet

Rilke tells the young poet not to search for answers not yet given, but to be patient with what's unsolved in the heart, and to love the questions themselves — the way one might love a room not yet entered. Live the question now, he says, and perhaps you'll live your way into the answer, gradually, some distant day.

~ Rilke says: be patient with what's unsolved, live the questions ~

~ I was never owed an answer ~

~ this amends is not an answer arriving ~

~ it is me agreeing, finally, to live the actual question ~

~ what happened between Bill and me, factually, apart from the myth ~

~ not the question I substituted — ~

~ what my father owed me and never paid ~

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