When I'm On Empty, I Look to Great Works for Inspiration and Strength

When I'm On Empty, I Look to Great Works for Inspiration and Strength

When I can’t go any further, I go back. I go back to decades and centuries to the poets, Rilke and Rumi, and the ancient truths of being. I go back to the original self help gurus. In their poems, hearts broken open, I breathe deep and slow and wrap myself in the understanding. From darkness, light.
 
The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you; Don't go back to sleep. You must ask for what you really want; Don't go back to sleep. People are going back and forth across the doorsill where the two worlds touch. The door is round and open. Don't go back to sleep.
~Rumi
 
Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against.
~Rumi

No mirror ever became iron again; 
No bread ever became wheat; 
No ripened grape ever became sour fruit. 
Mature yourself and be secure from a change for the worse. 
become the light.
~Rumi

Pale sunlight, pale the wall. Love moves away. The light changes I need more grace than I thought.
~Rumi
 
Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to 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 to 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 even noticing it, live your way into the answer.
~Rainer Maria Rilke
 
You, darkness, that I come from
I love you more than all the fires
that fence in the world, 
for the fire makes a circle of light for everyone
and then no one outside learns of you. 

But the darkness pulls in everything-
shapes and fires, animals and myself, 
how easily it gathers them! -
powers and people-

and it is possible a great presence is moving near me. 

I have faith in nights.

~Rilke