I should be content
to look at a mountain
for what it is
and not as a comment on my life.
David Ignatow
I want to live some place where calla lilies grow like weeds, on the side of the row, free for the picking. This particular lily is in Venezuela, where I spent the past 10 days, biking, hiking and exploring the Venezuelan Andes. And now it is spring, well, feels like summer on this freak warm March day, and time to spring clean, the house, the mind, the soul.
It reminds me to revisit my goals, to make new goals, and get rid of old goals, the ones that I’ve outgrown. Having goals gives me inspiration, a plan, something to anticipate, to look forward to. I recently reminded my students of the importance of setting goals, and mapping out the steps to achieve those goals especially as they approach graduation.
I need to do it just as much as they do.
I’ve been thinking about my goals a lot lately. Like many people I know, my life is consumed by busy-ness, and I want that to change. I also want to live someplace where bougainvillea grows. And both of these things are not going to happen overnight.
So there’s the long, long-term plan (to relocate someplace warm) and the many shorter term plans, the things that I hope to do sooner, than later.
Some goals are yearly, like running 1000 miles, trying to read a book every week or two, making art/writing creatively everyday, and having a girl date every week or two. Other goals are multi-yeared, like tenure, or down the road, like getting a Fulbright. But I think about them. I write about them, and I start to make plans.
But none of these goals address that bigger one, how to minimize that feeling of busy-ness. The older I get, the more I seek quiet–this helps with the busy-ness. So I silence the radio in my car. I sit in meditation. I attempt to walk and run mindfully in the woods. I choose to be alone, to stay home, to find the quiet.
Finding time in my day to focus on the third eye, to breathe, to sit, becomes my heroin, the fix I need to get my bliss, and this becomes the greatest goal of all.
What do you do to minimize the busy-ness? What are your goals?
I return to Rilke when I am feeling particularly discouraged. And to this letter. This letter haunts me, because I feel the call, that desire, that needling in the night to go to my studio to work. I was late for work a couple of times this week because I couldn’t help myself and picked up a paintbrush and began to adjust an image. And then before I knew it, 25 minutes had passed, and I had to abbreviate all the other things that needed to get done so I could get to work. All I can think about right now is my studio work, MY studio work. Not my work at PRESS, or my teaching obligations, but how am I going to squeeze in those moments where I can paint. My last entry expressed my fantasy for that free day. In the end, I got my wish, as March 1st was a snow day. And what did I do? I worked in my studio for ten hours. I ignored all of my other obligations and painted and painted and painted. Just thinking about it gives me bliss. I hope for more of these days, but in a regularly planned way. I hope days of bliss for you too.
And now, Rilke…
You ask whether your verses are any good. You ask me. You have asked others before. You send them to magazines. You compare them with other poems, and you are disturbed when certain editors reject your efforts. Now (since you have allowed me to advise you) I beg you to give up all of that. You are looking outward, and that above all you should not do now. Nobody can counsel and help you, nobody. There is only one single way. Go into yourself. Search for the reason that bids you write; find out whether it is spreading out its roots in the deepest places of your heart; acknowledge to yourself whether you would have to die if you were denied to write. This above all: ask yourself in the stillest hour of your night: must I write? Delve into yourself for a deep answer. And if this should be affirmative, if you may meet this earnest question with a strong and simple “I must,” then build your life according to this necessity; your life, even into its most indifferent and slightest hour, must be a sign of this urge and a testimony to it. Then draw near to Nature. Then try, like some first human being, to say what you see and experience and love and lose. Do not write love poems; avoid at first those forms that are too facile and commonplace: they are the most difficult, for it takes great, fully matured power to to give something of your own where good, and even excellent traditions come to mind in quantity. Therefore save yourself from these general themes and seek those which your own everyday life offers you; describe your sorrows and desires, passing thoughts and the belief in some sort of beauty–describe all these with loving quiet, humble sincerity, and use, to express yourself, the things in your environment, the images from your dreams, and the objects of your memory. A work of art is good if it has spring from necessity. In this nature of its origin lies the judgment of it: there is no other. Therefore, I known no advice for you save this: to go into yourself and test the deeps in which your life takes rise; at its source you will find the answer to the question whether you must create. Accept it, just as it sounds, without inquiring into it. Perhaps it will turn out 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 recompense might come from outside. Letter dated Paris, February 17, 1903 From Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, translated by M.D. Herter Norton, WW Norton & Company, New York/London, 1934