Whenever I feel stuck in my writing (and a long walk in the forest doesn’t do the trick), I like to flip to a random page of Rainier Maria Rilke’s ‘Letters to a Young Poet’, which, like consulting the I Ching, seems to point me in the right direction. Below is the passage I turned to today.
Viareggio, Italy
April 23, 1903
Allow your judgements their own silent, undisturbed development, which, like all progress, must come from deep within and cannot be forced or hastened. Everything is gestation and then birthing. To let each impression and each embryo of a feeling come to completion, entirely in itself, in the dark, in the unsayable, the unconscious, beyond the reach of one’s own understanding, and with deep humility and patience to wait for the hour when a new clarity is born: this alone is what it means to live as an artist: in understanding as in creating.
In this there is no measuring with time, a year doesn’t matter and ten years are nothing. Being an artist means not numbering and counting, but ripening like a tree, which doesn’t force its sap, and stands confidently in the storms of spring, and not afraid afterward summer may not come. It does come. But it comes only to those who are patient, who are there as if eternity lay before them, so unconcernedly silent and vast.
From an excerpt of a letter written by Rainier Maria Rilke to ‘a young poet.’
