I once read a book called Anum Cara, by John O'Donahue. He said in his book, Everyone needs a soul friend, an anum cara. It feels sometimes that the world is a souless buffet set up to satisfy material hunger. But its not.
The funny thing happens on that day we find ourself out looking for the anum cara we need. Maybe we just sit down for a minute on a big granite rock and stare up at puffy white clouds and wait.
Rainier Maria Rilke wrote a reply letter to a young poet, age 19. who had sent him his soul in the form of poems and asked Rilke if his poety was good.
Maybe twenty years later on another big rock, a person sits, again looking up maybe at the sun and the colors of light it carries, feeling the warmth it radiates. How patient is that sun rising every day and asking the world the same question. Do you see now?
Rilke wrote in a later letter to Franz, the young poet,
"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"
Sometimes it feels that the world is a dark place with souless puppets casting long shadows into the landscape. And the question is Why?
But one day the silent granite stone filled with radiant quartz crystals begins to loudly reverberate the sun's question. Ah YES. Yes I see. The colors are the sounds vibrating within me. The dull and dreary dreadful and the double rainbow are my own frequency reflecting back to me.
The anum cara is me resonating harmony.
Letters To A Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) was first published in 1929.
The young poet was Franz Xaver Kappus and he wrote
"And so my regular correspondence with Rainer Maria Rilke began, lasting until 1908 and then gradually petering out because life forced me into domains which the poet’s warm, tender and moving concern had precisely wanted to protect me from. But that is unimportant. The only important thing is the ten letters that follow, important for the insight they give into the world in which Rainer Maria Rilke lived and worked, and important too for many people engaged in growth and change, today and in the future. And where a great and unique person speaks, the rest of us should be silent."
Franz Xaver Kappus -Berlin, June 1929
This book has always been a top of the list, always a cherished book on a shelf in my world where live the poets and the writers I never met but have truly loved.
To understand if the book will appeal to you as reader I think it could depend on which stage of life you are in, or how well you remember your twenties. Rilke and Kappus were in their twenties during the correspondence, Rilke 26 and Kappus, I think, was 19 when he first wrote.
