Protect and Border and Greet: Inspired by Solitude and Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet
Gouache and ink on paper
Poetry can transport us to moments, feelings, and human experiences. Poetry can condense great vastnesses into something palatable and, perhaps, even relatable.
Poet Rainer Maria Rilke‘s Letters to a Young Poet has continuously nurtured my inspiration. When I first read these letters (in what felt like a single sitting, but it must have been a few days), I was nearing the halfway point of my 16th year. It was a time when my search for some kind of personal and universal meaning had recently begun.
Though my time of questing and questioning that I suspect will last for the rest of my life, I’ve learned that within the quest for self is a longing for connection. Rilke’s letters began a chain reaction in me that ended in a fairly simple understanding: solitude is not the antithesis of connection. Instead, solitude is the beginning point of relationship, deep and lasting relationship.In “Letter Four,” Rilke writes,
love your solitude and try to sing out with the pain it causes you.
In the years that have passed since I first read the letters, I’ve begun to comprehend solitude’s ability to make humans sing out. For it is within solitude that most art is made, it is within solitude that letters are written, and it is solitude that invites us, as people, to deepen our understanding of, and relish, our togetherness. In “Letter Seven,” Rilke writes of the necessity solitude plays in the relationship “between one human being and another”:
the love that consists in this: that two solitudes protect and border and greet each other.
With today’s piece, I wonder what would happen if people were to–in our daily lives, in small acts–embrace our solitudes and let them border, protect, and greet each other. What might happen?
125 days done, 240 to go.
NadiaCDM 