Rilke

Just down the road from the cozy argosy trailer I discovered the book "Letters to a Young Poet". The white spine of this teeny novel leapt from a crowded bookshelf in an abandoned house, and I left the property embedded in its pages. Those first few months I used its passages as a mild meditation, reading it only in quiet, calm places. The astonishing depth and direct truth in the words took several readings to settle and resonate. When I returned to thetis island with my suitcases and tucked away for the winter, it became a daily routine to spend time within these letters from Rainer Maria Rilke. The book's previous owner had highlighted the occasional quote (some I knew why, some I didn't) and as Rilke's teachings attached themselves to my thought process and understanding, I underlined other poignant phrases in pencil. Now, I've read this collection over 30 times (only 109 pages) and what it says sinks deeper within me each time I move through the letters written between February 1903 - December 1908. Having just embarked on 7 months of solitude in the middle of the woods as I began to read Rilke daily, his words imprinted and ignited many of my own. I see him not only as a poet, but as a spiritual guide as well. Letters to a Young Poet by: Rainer Maria Rilke - (translated by Stephen Mitchell) - "You ask whether your verses are any good. You ask me. You have asked others before this. You send them to magazines. You compare them with other poems, and you are upset when certain editors reject your work. Now (since you have said you want my advice) I beg you to stop doing that sort of thing. You are looking outside, and that is what you should most avoid right now. No one can advise or help you - no one. There is only one thing you should do. Go into yourself. Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depths of your heart; confess to yourself whether you would have to die if you were forbidden to write. This most of all: ask yourself in the most silent hour of your night: must I write? Dig into yourself for a deep answer. And if this answer rings out in assent, if you meet this solemn question with a strong, simple "I must," then build your life in accordance with this necessity; your whole life, even into its humblest and most indifferent hour, must become a sign and witness to this impulse. Then come close to Nature." - page 5/6 "...if out of this turning-within, out of this immersion in your own world, poems come, then you will not think of asking anyone whether they are good or not ...for you will see them as your dear natural possession, a piece of your life, a voice from it." - page 8/9 "So, dear Sir, I can't give you any advice but this: to go into yourself and see how deep the place is from which your life flows; at its source you will find the answer to the question of whether you must create. Accept that answer, just as it is given to you, without trying to interpret it. Perhaps you will discover that you are called to be an artist. Then take that destiny upon yourself, and bear it, its burden and its greatness, without ever asking what reward might come from outside. For the creator must be a world for himself and must find everything in himself and in Nature, to whom his whole life is devoted." - page 9/10 "...I want to add just one more bit of advice: to keep growing, silently and earnestly, through your whole development; you couldn't disturb it any more violently than by looking outside and waiting for outside answers to questions that only your innermost feeling, in your quietest hour, can perhaps answer." - page 10/11 "Read as little as possible of literary criticism - such things are either partisan opinions, which have become petrified and meaningless, hardened and empty of life, or else they are just clever word-games, in which one view wins today and tomorrow the opposite view. Works of art are of an infinite solitude, and no means of approach is so useless as criticism. Only love can touch and hold them and be fair to them. -Always trust yourself and your own feeling, as opposed to argumentations, discussions, or introductions of that sort..." - page 22/23 "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, not afraid that afterward summer may not come. It does come. But it only comes to those who are patient, who are there as if eternity lay before them, so unconcernedly silent and vast. I learn it every day of my life, learn it with pain I am grateful for: patience is everything!" - page 23-25 "...I would like to beg you, dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer." - page 34/35 "...love your solitude and try to sing out with the pain it causes you. For those who are near you are far away, you write, and this shows that the space around you is beginning to grow vast. And if what is near you is far away, then your vastness is already among the stars and is very great; be happy about your growth, in which of course you can't take anyone with you, and be gentle with those who stay behind..." - page 42