Untitled

by Rainer Maria Rilke

And you wait. You wait for the one thing that will change your life, make it more than it is— something wonderful, exceptional, stones awakening, depths opening to you.

In the dusky bookstalls old books glimmer gold and brown. You think of lands you journeyed through, of paintings and a dress once worn by a woman you never found again.

Garden pen, Water color 2010 ©Sanae Sugimoto

* * * *

Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness, any misery, any depression, since after all you don't know what work these conditions are doing inside you? Why do you want to persecute yourself with the question of where all this is coming from and where it is going? Since you know, after all, that you are in the midst of transitions and you wished for nothing so much as to change. If there is anything unhealthy in your reactions, just bear in mind that sickness is the means by which an organism frees itself from what is alien; so one must simply help it to be sick, to have its whole sickness and to break out with it, since that is the way it gets better.

Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet