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If you have listened to Onbeing for any period of time, you've probably heard me invoke Reiner Maria Rilka.

His works of prose and poetry are enduringly beloved, the sonnets to Orpheus, the Dueno-Elogies, the Book of Hours.

But none of his words have carried more persistently across time than his letters to a young poet.

It's a small volume of ten letters Rilka wrote between 1903 and 1908 to a young military cadet and would-be poet named Franz Kapus.

Kapus reached out to Rilka full of anguish about life, about love, about adulthood.

But Rilka's way of addressing these questions from an ordinary life touched on the enduring dramas of creating our lives,

prophetic musings about solitude and relationship, humanity and the natural world, even gender and human wholeness.

And now for us there is a new translation.

What a joy it is to delve into Rilka's voice freshly rendered with the translators, themselves prophetic humans,

the wise psychologist and poet Anita Barros and the incomparable Buddhist philosopher of ecology Joanna Macy.

In his song, the letter that he wrote and wrote an amazing letter Rilka did from Sweden, and he starts out saddened thinking.

He's not responding so much to the cadet, but he's speaking about there's something going to happen.

It is enormous, it is huge. We must accept our reality and all its immensity.

Everything, even the unheard of, must be possible within it.

This is, in the end, the only courage required of us.

The courage to meet what is strangest and most awesome.

I'm Christa Tippett and this is on being.

The conversation that follows is infused with friendship as much as ideas.

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