Rainer Maria Rilke was an Austrian poet who wrote 100 years ago about thresholds, liminality, and how we grow through uncertainty. I recently came across this poem and felt it held an answer to a burning question.

God speaks to each of us as he makes us,
then walks with us silently out of the night.

These are the words we dimly hear:

You, sent out beyond your recall,
go to the limits of your longing.

Embody me.

Flare up like a flame
and make big shadows I can move in.

Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.
Don’t let yourself lose me.

Nearby is the country they call life.
You will know it by its seriousness.

Give me your hand.

- Rainer Maria Rilke

I always exchange the word “God” for “reality” or “all that is”, so that’s how I read it. Framing aside, the invitation is to let reality happen — beauty and terror — without numbing yourself to either. The reminder that no feeling is final, that we’re always in passage.

It reads like instructions for crossing a threshold. Which is, I think, where many of us find ourselves as this year ends.

2025 has been heavy. Many people I love are navigating uncertainty, watching foundations they trusted feel suddenly unstable, wondering what kind of world we’re building and who it’s being built for. Not knowing what’s next is exhausting.

Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart
and try to love the questions themselves,
like locked rooms and like books that are now written
in a very foreign tongue.
Do not now seek the answers,
which cannot be given to you
because you would not be able to live them.
And the point is, to live everything.
Live the questions now.
Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it,
live along some distant day
into the answer.

- Rainer Maria Rilke

Love the questions. Don’t grasp for answers before you’ve lived your way into them. Uncertainty isn’t the obstacle — it’s the territory. Refreshing in this era of the always right, never-lived answer-machines.

I’ve been thinking about what it means to live in a question, and for me, there’s no better place to explore than music.

The most enduring music doesn’t emerge from comfort. It comes from people holding difficult contradictions — spirituals from slavery, blues born from sharecropper struggles, soul from segregated cities, freedom songs from apartheid South Africa, disco from communities told their joy wasn’t welcome in public. This music didn’t resolve suffering; it transformed it. It made the unbearable inhabitable. It was, and is, a technology for survival.

It isn’t just that this music came from hardship; it’s that the hardship seemed to demand an honest reflection — an unwillingness to pretend things were fine, combined with a refusal to surrender to despair. In jazz and blues, a “blue note” (also called a “worried note”) captures this duality as a resonance and emotion you can feel. It doesn’t give you an answer. It stays in the question.

Nina Simone knew this. Aretha Franklin knew it. They could take you to church and to the dance floor in the same breath because they understood that joy and sorrow aren’t opposites. They’re neighbors. Sometimes roommates. I think that’s why their music still hits so hard. Not because it transports us away from difficulty, but because it teaches us how to be inside it — with dignity, with defiance, with hips moving.

So here’s my intention for 2026, shaped by music, and guided by the words of Rilke. We don’t just receive reality. We participate in its making. The stories we tell shape what we notice, what we build, what we believe is possible. Attention is a creative act, and so much of it has been stolen from us. So is gathering — when people come together around a shared frequency, something shifts. The civil rights movement understood this. The songs weren’t decoration. They were infrastructure, synchronizing belief into collective will.

Music is one of the oldest technologies we have for this kind of coordination. A rhythm is an invitation to align. A melody is a container for feeling. When we listen together, when we move together, we’re rehearsing a way of being in the world. We’re practicing what we want to become.

I don’t think we can think our way out of this moment. But I do believe we can dance our way through it. As was say in the Rhythm Society, “we are one in the dance.”

So here’s an offering as we cross into a new year — two of my favorite mixes from 2025.

“Dance Camp” was the name of our community summer gathering near Clear Lake. A hot weekend with warm nights and dancing under the stars. I opened our Saturday evening program with a warmup set bridging deep soul and jazz-laden cuts with deep house rhythms.

“Lucky 13” — our Winter Solstice celebration was all about challenging norms, embracing the unknown, and leaning into our struggles. I was asked to play mash-ups, which I generally don’t love, but dug deep into my collection to find a bunch of really lovely, soulful, deep tracks mashed in ways that elevated and expanded their original beauty.

I’ll leave it there. No feeling is final. Just keep going. Let the music help.

P.S., Here’s a “DJ edit” of mine — a mash-up of Nina Simone’s “Save Me” and a tech house track by Oscar Jones called “Thylacine”. I played this edit at a little RS daytime event in 2023. MP3 download here. If you’d like to use it for a DJ set, here’s a lossless version.