The silence must be immense where you are living right now, immense enough to allow such tumult of sound and motion. And if you think that in the ocean’s vastness there exists not only the present moment but reverberations of primordial harmonies, then you can be patient and trust the great and indelible solitude at work in you. This will be a nameless influence in all that lies ahead for you to experience and accomplish, rather as if the blood of our ancestors moves in us and combines with ours in the unique, unrepeatable being that at every turn of our life we are.
– Rainer Maria Rilke, Letter to a Young Poet (Paris, December 26, 1908)
From, again, the beautiful blog A Year With Rilke
I SOOO needed to read that right now. Solitude. Ahh. Maybe that is what is going on inside me. I thought it was insanity. xoxo
Another poignant quote from Rilke.
It reminded me of an essay written by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, titled The Solitude of Self:
“No mortal ever has been, nor mortal ever will be, like the soul just launched on the sea of life. … Nature never repeats herself and the possibilities of one human soul will never be found in another.”