You Are the Future

Following Rilke’s advice to “live the questions," this book invites us to draw upon his startling insights and often unconventional wisdom to see ourselves as ripening, unfolding, and always becoming.

“This is a book to savor, soaking up the rewards of stories, insights, and provocations about the passage of our lives." —Sally Gillespie, author of Climate Crisis and Consciousness: Re-imagining our World and Ourselves

"You Are the Future beckons us to discover a wise way to live a life in the company of self and others.” —Pádraig Ó Tuama, poet, peace activist, and host of On Being’s “Poetry Unbound”

Rainer Maria Rilke's illuminative writings have influenced and shaped readers over the century since his death. Rilke’s spiritual “unorthodoxy” speaks uniquely to our times, fraught as they are with anxieties and shadowed with violence. In the hands of two writers who have journeyed with Rilke over the arc of their lives, this book explores some of the essential questions we all face. Among the existential issues this book explores are these: “How do we live the questions?”; “What about death?”; “What path into creativity?”; “What does darkness open us to?”All translations of Rilke throughout the volume (poems, citations from his correspondence, etc.) are those of Mark Burrows, a native German speaker and renowned translator of Rilke.