I’ve been meditating over this passage in Rilke since I finished the Letters:

We have no reason to mistrust our world, for it is not against us. Has it terrors, they are our terrors; has it abysses, those abysses belong to us; are dangers at hand, we must try to love them. And if only we arrange our life according to that principle which counsels us that we must always hold to the difficult, then that which now still seems to us the most alien will become what we most trust and find most faithful. How should we be able to forget those ancient myths that are at the beginning of all peoples, the myths about dragons that at the last moment turn into princesses; perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave. Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us.

I have no idea what he is thinking of here. I cannot grasp it with my intellect, and yet it has a deep truth that has affected me since I read it again. I don’t even know of any myths of dragons turning to princesses. But as someone who faces many debilitating fears, the idea that the things I fear could be simply things that are giving me the opportunity to be beautiful and brave brings light and fresh wind into some inner rooms that I’ve kept boarded over. I want to understand this more fully in way that I can’t now.
leisure
It’s our inclination to walk away from what’s difficult, to believe that we’re protecting ourselves, and maybe even others around us. I think this is why Rilke harps on it so much; the idea of holding on to what’s difficult appears in almost every letter. I’m amazed at our capacity as humans to love and to yearn and to imagine, and yet there are so many things we will walk away from because they terrify us with their beauty, with the shock of sight or knowledge we didn’t see or know before. It makes me think of the lines from Yeats’ “Easter 1916″ poem:

All changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.

It’s that change that we are inclined to deny and turn away from. We become accustomed to life as we’ve lived it, and then something comes along that shakes everything that we called a foundation. But what have we to give and gain from life if we do not embrace those shattering moments and let them penetrate us fully? Do we not grow a little larger? do not our inner regions expand and our own capacity for loving and understanding increase?

I cannot imagine my life without having willed myself to stand on the precipices presented before me and close my eyes, feeling the wind at my back, rather than clinging to the rocks nearby (though I have done that on occasion as well). And each time, though it brings both pain and pleasure, I am left with a calmer, broader spirit that hovers over everything I encounter and comforts me in my solitude. It acquaints me with parts of myself I never knew were there - that were just patiently waiting for a name.

What have we to lose but an old way of understanding our world that we’ve grown so used to we don’t even recognize it anymore, like the street signs on our way home that we can’t recall when someone asks us? But in the terror of an upheaval we discover new roads, new ways, and new wells from which we draw a living water. And we are fuller when the upheaval passes and the leaves and feathers settle around us. We are something new. We can shake out our hair and laugh at the mess.

What if our dragons are princesses that need our help? And what if instead of saying “Poor me - having to face this dragon! How did I end up here?” we say “I will face this dragon and I will survive”? Will we be rewarded with a princess who needs our embrace?

The fact is, we often spoil the terrifying beauty because we see only terror. We run, or hide our faces, or pretend that silence will protect us and allow us to forget the glimpse we saw. And so the beauty recedes and we are left the same as we were before — a neatly folded napkin on a starched, white tablecloth, in front of a chair in which no one ever sits.

I pray that these times are few, and the times we partake of the things life presents us so fully that they become a part of our blood and our being, changing us and causing us to runneth over - I pray those times are many.

Picture is Tricia Koning “Leisure, Leisure”