“Works of art are of an infinite solitariness, and nothing is less likely to bring us near to them than criticism. Only love can apprehend and hold them, and can be just towards them. Decide each time according to yourself and your feelings in the face of every such declaration, discussion or introduction; if you should still be wrong, the natural growth of your inner life will lead you slowly in the course of time to other perceptions. Let your judgments have their own quiet, undisturbed development, which must, like all progress, come from deep within, and cannot in any way be pressed or hurried. It means everything to carry for the full time and then to bring forth. 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 is alone what living as an artist means: in understanding as in creation.”
Oh.
How that rings true within me.
…nothing is less likely to bring us near to them than criticism.
For sure, good can and might come out of criticism, but just imagine the amount of ”works of art” not born to this world, due to the fear of being criticized alone. And not but from others. I believe many have the most strident critic within them; stopping works of art from being born, out of fear of what inner or outer critics might (or might not!) say.
…the natural growth of your inner life will lead you slowly in the course of time to other perceptions.
So please. Create.
Knowing there’s no hurry. No rush.
Let it take its time and be whatever it wants to be.
But do not withhold that within you that which is to be, that which wants to be… perhaps even, that which must be?
It means everything to carry for the full time and then to bring forth.
Once born, it might not be, what you wanted it to. But the next creation, might. Or the one after.
In time, I believe it will. To get there, one has to let go, and let come, that which wants to happen.
#Blogg100 challenge in 2017 – post number 76 of 100.
The book “Letters to a Young Poet” by Rainer Maria Rilke.
English posts here, Swedish at herothecoach.com.