'Becoming'

Rilke wrote it in 1903 to a young poet who had sent him his work and asked for judgment: “I would like to beg you, dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves. … Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.” He was not describing the creative life only. He was describing the developmental one — the long, strange process of becoming something you cannot yet name.

The caterpillar does not know it is becoming a butterfly. It experiences only the dissolution — the complete liquefaction of its previous structure inside the chrysalis. There is no certainty available to it. It becomes something it has never been before without a roadmap, without reassurance, without evidence that what is happening is transformation rather than ending.

Nothing in nature is finished. The seed is becoming a root. The root is becoming a stem. The garden never arrives at a final state. It is always in the middle of something.

This is for the woman who is in the middle of something she cannot yet name — and is learning to trust that the middle is not the end.