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

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 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 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.

Mark S. Burrows is an award-winning translator, poet, and scholar. Known internationally for his academic and popular work on Rilke, he is the translator of a collection of his early poems, Prayers of a Young Poet, which includes many of Rilke’s best-loved poems that later appeared in The Book of Hours. His forthcoming bilingual edition of Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus (Monkfish, 2024) has been praised as “beautiful, daring translations that return to us the power and mystery of the original ‘unknowing’ qualities that drive Rilke’s verse” (Ellen Hinsey). Winner of the Wytter Bynner Prize in Poetry, a collection of his recent poems, The Chance of Home, appeared in 2018. During the last decade he has also published a volume of poems-in-translation by the distinguished Iranian-German poet SAID, 99 Psalms (2013), the first English translation of poems by the celebrated German-Jewish poet Hilde Domin, The Wandering Radiance. Selected Poems of Hilde Domin (2023), and three volumes of poems, co-written with Jon M. Sweeney, inspired by the medieval mystic Meister Eckhart (most recently, Meister Eckhart’s Book of Darkness and Light. Meditations on the Path of the Wayless Way; 2023). He lives and writes in Camden, ME. https://soul-in-sight.org

Stephanie Dowrick, PhD, D. Min, has won major US awards for three of her books: Choosing Happiness: Life & soul essentials, Creative Journal Writing, and Heaven on Earth. A former leading publisher and psychotherapist, her much-loved best-sellers also include Intimacy & Solitude, Forgiveness and Other Acts of Love, The Universal Heart, Seeking the Sacred, and, on reading and Rilke, In the Company of Rilke. Her most recent book (2024) is Your name is not Anxious. She has written fiction for adults and children, contributes widely to mainstream and social media, and is known for her public speaking and workshop/retreat leadership in person and via Zoom. Dr. Dowrick was born in Aotearoa/New Zealand, spent sixteen years in Europe, mainly in the UK where she co-founded The Women’s Press in London. She now lives in Australia and makes active use of global social media. www.stephaniedowrick.com