wait for the hour

Always trust yourself and your own feeling, 

as opposed to argumentations, discussion, 

or introductions of that sort; if it turns out that you are wrong, 

then the natural growth of your inner life will eventually guide you to other insights. 

Allow your judgments their own silent, undisturbed development, 

which, like all progress, must come from deep within 

and cannot be forced or hastened. 

Everything is gestation and then birthing. 

To let each impression and each embryo of a feeling come to completion,

 entirely in itself, in the dark, in the unsayable, the unconscious, 

beyond the reach of one’s own understanding, and with deep humility 

and patience to wait for the hour when a new clarity is born: 

this alone is what it means to live as an artist: in understanding as in creating.

~Rainer Maria Rilke

from Letters to a young poet, letter 3

translation by Stephen Mitchell
image found at art42