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Jul 8, 2018

"If you would know strength and patience, welcome the company of trees." --Hal Borland

The Lonely Patience of Creative Work

Poet Rainier Maria Rilke believed that patience was vital to creative work: "Being an artist means, not reckoning and counting, but ripening like the tree which does not force its sap and stands confident in the storms of spring without the fear that after them may come no summer. It does come. But it comes only to the patient, who are there as though eternity lay before them, so unconcernedly still and wide. I learn it daily, learn it with pain to which I am grateful: patience is everything!" In order for work to flourish into art, the artist's soul needs incubatory periods of self-reflection.