You Are the Future: Living the Questions with Rainer Maria Rilke

by Mark S. Burrows, Stephanie Dowrick

2025 Nautilus Award Winner | Silver | Body, Mind, Spirit

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 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 poetry has inspired readers for more than a century, and never more so than now. His rare spiritual vision speaks uniquely in a time when many are seeking freedom of thought and a more wholistic way of living. Written by two award-winning writers who have journeyed deeply with Rilke, this book invites readers—with Rilke—to “live” the deep questions facing us in our day, embracing the poet’s refusal to reach for simplistic “answers.” Through the originality and insight of their writing, Burrows and Dowrick honor readers’ own experiences and, in conversation with Rilke, invite them to examine their lives and “desire the change,” as the poet put it. In so doing, they bring sublime poetry into the heart of daily life, where the gifts it carries are most needed. All translations are by Mark S. Burrows, a widely respected Rilke scholar and translator.

Genres: Poetry

269 pages, Kindle Edition

Published October 1, 2024

Reviews

[Claudia G · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Poetry of the kind we are experiencing — and not just reading here — helps us see the subtle and the great as coexistent,” Mark S. Burrows and Stephanie Dowrick write in You Are The Future, Living the Questions with Rainer Maria Rilke. “Dance the orange,” pens Rilke in one poem and, “I’m circling around God, around the ancient tower,” in another.

At the outset, Mark S. Burrow and Stephanie Dowrick share, “We see this book — and have experienced this in our writing of it — as a guide into wisdom: a new kind of wisdom that lifts burdens, adds vibrant texture.…We write here in conversation with Rilke and each other, opening to a ‘wiser way’ than is more generally offered in our hectic, demanding societies….” Indeed, their “heart work” offers us a precious opportunity to do our “heart work.” Their writing is both subtle and great, taking us on a journey to “inhabiting the wholeness of who you are.”

You Are The Future is a glorious book. It shares my daily life as a wise mentor and friend. We are born without a manual in hand and live our lives, so often without living the questions, but struggling to know the answers. Wisely designed around a question, each chapter may be read stand-alone, or in any order. Chapter One invites us, “To Be a Beginner,” offering a fresh start. Perhaps, in these turbulent times, you resonate today with the chapter, “Facing the Dark,” when it often feels doing nothing or everything is unsafe, even futile. Other chapters invite us to live questions including How Do Others See You? Who Am I? More than Your Mistakes.

There is love in this volume of woven poetry and prose - and insight and gentleness. “Take your time with this. Take your time with this,” Mark S. Burrows and Stephanie Dowrick encourage, “So much in our world dampens our passion. Shrinks our horizons. Tells us what we must fear. What we can’t do.”

“Being here matters so much.” Rilke

I am, you are, we are the future.


May 2025