I’m working at kindling up a creative spark. Thinking about small moments that want to be explored and then out of the blue I had a flash of a moment from my 20s that was so clear and vivid I could have been sitting on the grass in in the quad at San Francisco State circa 1980 drinking coffee from a vending machine, because there was no money for cappuccinos. Those were the years that filled journals with poems and entries struggling with that universal question “am I loveable? am I worthy of love?” Pages fueled by passion and that unquenchable need to write it down. That need to explore those universal questions found me in a creative writing class that assigned a mimeographed excerpt from Rilke’s “Letters to a Young Poet”. I think the intent was to inspire us or at least shape our writing, but there was a thread line in there about needing to live life before you can write about it and those words quieted my voice. For years. His real intent was something more to do with an inward journey and solitude, but at the time what I heard was “shut up there’s nothing of value you have to say until you’ve lived.” And I used it as a sign, an excuse to not write. I used it as a stop sign so I wouldn’t have to test myself.

As I sit here, once again in my life trying to fan that creative impulse it brought me back to sitting on the grass in that quad with those mimeographed papers and the wind of doubt I that allowed in. But instead of letting doubt sneak back, I decided to re-read Rilke. The girl in her 20s saw a stop sign, a well lived woman nearing 60 now knows it was just ] a detour. I’m not silencing myself any longer, I heard not just the permission, but the call to write. “You are so young, you have not even begun, and I would like to beg you, dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything that is unsolved in your heart and to try to cherish the questions themselves, like closed rooms and like books written in a very strange tongue. Do not search now for answers which cannot be given you because you could not live them. It is a matter of living everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, one distant day live right into the anwer”. And he was right, I did live into the answer. And really no matter the question, the answer is always love, in all forms, always.