the reason for rilke

We know we are always coming back to Rilke, but there is a reason. Sometimes it feels like one is walking against a fierce wind making progress so slow it is not progress. This is the time, if you have a biblical turn of mind, of the devil. The devilish details create a quagmire, much like the one we are in in Iraq. This is the time it is easier to give up and say, "It is useless. It doesn't matter."

Then Rilke reminds us,

• "And when you realize that their activities are shabby, that their vocations are petrified and no longer connected with life, why not then continue to look upon it all as a child would, as if you were looking at something unfamiliar, out of the depths of your own solitude, which is itself work and status and vocation? Why should you want to give up a child's wise not-understanding in exchange for defensiveness and scorn, since not-understanding is, after all, a way of being alone, whereas defensiveness and scorn are participation in precisely what, by these means, you want to separate yourself from." tiara tip sfgoth and the Steven Mitchell translation of Letters to a Young Poet.

And so we slog on. Knowing what we seek is internal and can only be won by working through the worries, "I am not good enough" and "I am too good to be true."

At these crucial times Queenie's Daughter urges her readers to think of fragrant Rosemary and remember: we are all children of royalty and already possess the noble blood that will allow each one of us to as reign as kings and queens of peace.