#existenstialism

Le soleil se couche sur tous les rêveurs désespérés. Les couleurs orange brûlé et rouge clair se fondent dans le ciel bleu créant un affichage dégradé qui ne cesse de provoquer l’émerveillement ou l’envie de voyager. Un autre jour est passé. Des milliers de pensées sont allées et venues. Les sourires ont égayé notre journée. Le rire nous fait rêver de ce que le lendemain peut apporter. Les…

There was not very much that made me feel alive anymore.Life was just one bland mixture, painted on an imperfect canvas with fading and cheap colors.    Amateurish, ugly to the rest of the world.I was ugly on the inside, which distorted my reflection on the outside. my colors ran, they bled out.    Yet someday, somehow, someone found beauty in in me.Someone found beauty in me.Though I was poor…

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now 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."

Dear reader, I first discovered this bit of advice in Rainer Maria Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet while observing 40 days of silence at a monastery in New Mexico. Questions had led me there – ones about spirituality, God, existence, and my own life’s meaning – but surprisingly, even after nearly three months dedicated to prayer, reading, and writing, I left with very few answers. I did, however, leave with much more meaningful questions – ones that I’m still living into today.

Possessing an answer can bring about confidence and self-assuredness, but bypassing the discovery requisite of “living into the answer” can deprive the seeker of ever realizing the full weight of the answer itself.

So, in honor of this learning, I want to open this newsletter up to those who aren’t seeking answers, but are eager to ask more expansive questions.

What questions you have been asking?

With your replies, I’m going to create a topic calendar of regular newsletters focused on musing with you about the questions you raise.

Would you like to participate in this existential rambling with me?

The only right answer to this question is to question.

Happy asking,

Dane

After a moment's pause, I realize how bad it feels.

If only I was sure about uncertainty

and the causality of this duality

or the rough fragment that I seem to have become.

What I thought was the universe opening before me

was only a vast emptiness inside.

A ridged, hollow wasteland defined only by its lack

and I do not yet know its depths.

I wonder if most people ride the surface tension

and how do they keep from caving in on themselves.

How a life once defined by hope and love is given to fear,

a small price next to pain and doubt.

For every look of tenderness, now many of indifference? 

And what do you trust in the moment everything abandons you?

It is after all you who teeters over the chaos

Pray for balance or a turn of the tide.

No matter how high life gets you, gravity will win.

Every sensation has is opposite, inseparable opposite.

Consequence can crush the heartiest most robust intent.

Still each caries enticing possibility in its wake.

Yet, innumerable are things we do not see

and then, to see one may be to see all.

To describe one to know all