Rilke Knows Everything

Burlington, VT, Lighthouse, photo by S.G.

“To be an artist means: not to calculate and count; to grow and ripen like a tree which does not hurry the flow of its sap and stands at ease in the spring gales without fearing that no summer may follow. It will come. But it comes only to those who are patient, who are simply there in their vast, quiet tranquility, as if eternity lay before them."

 --Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet (emphasis mine)