Tuesday, December 8, 2009

dry spell

... not weather-wise. I'm talking about dried-up creative juices. For a long time, I've been feeling these conflicting tugs and pulls from different directions. Academics. Work. Yoga. Photography. Art. Well, it's not that they're mutually exclusive. One just has to take priority over the other at different times. For the past year, it's been Academics. Writing has been focused on research, not journaling. For a while my camera was gathering dust. But these are the choices I've made, and I'm standing by them.

As can be expected, I have not been doing much photography lately, and have been somewhat disappointed in my recent attempts.

Almost instinctively, I picked up my copy of Letters to a Young Poet by Rainier Maria Rilke. I leafed through the dog-eared pages, revisited pages I've marked, words I've underlined. I came back to this:

"To allow every impression and every germ of a feeling to grow to completion wholly in yourself, in the darkness, in the unutterable, unconscious, inaccessible to your own understanding, and to await with deep humility and patience the hour of birth of a new clarity: that alone what living as an artist means: in understanding as in creation.

To be an artist means: not to reckon and count; to ripen like the tree which does not force its sap and stands confident in the storms of Spring without fear lest no Summer might come after. It does come. But it comes only to the patient ones, who are there as if eternity lay in front of them, so unconcernedly still and far. I am learning it daily, learning it through pains to which I am grateful: patience is all!"

It does come.

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