As we work towards everything we desire a patient contentment must enter our hearts. Nothing requires more patience than loving another person; love is often rushed by people craving love. I believe, because we know pain, anxiety, loneliness, and insecurity so intimately we desire to love ourselves in the other person. We want this love to make up for all the time we spent alone, but our inability to rise towards our responsibility of loving with distance we end up where we began, alone. Heartbreaks reveal our distance from ourselves, for our peace was ripped away as suddenly and spontaneously as it came; we are not loving when we use love to escape. We enter a toxic dependency avoiding the necessary resources, found only in loneliness, that nurture our ability to love. We must face our faults; face our anxieties; face our lack of consistency, and accept ourselves entirely before we give ourselves over to another person. I critique my spiritual contemporaries that believe we must be fully healed before being able to receive love; chaos and peace rest side by side.

In Letters to a Young Poet Rilke says, “And you must not be led astray in your loneliness, because there is something in you that desires to come out of you. If you think of it quietly and use it as an instrument, this very desire will help you to extend your loneliness over the broad lands. To love, too, is good, for love is difficult. Loving between human being and human being, that is perhaps the most difficult thing with which we have been charged, the extreme possibility, the last test and trial, the work for which all other work is but preparation.” Our ability to love is dependent on the distance we can maintain between us and our partners; while a union is focused on sacrificing for the good of the whole we must learn to allow independent growth between our partners and ourselves. Love must become a teacher that follows us through every intimate part of our lives and aid us in the journey of self-discovery. As we escape the bias of masculinity and femininity warping our image of each other we began to love human to human; the conventions that distort our image of each other cause us to never live up to the expectation, and eventually leads to our heartbreak. Only through embracing each other solitudes can the individual love both intimately and from a distance.

When my soul touches yours a great chord sings!
How shall I tune it then to other things?
O! That some spot in darkness could be found
That does not vibrate when’er your depth sound.
But everything that touches you and me
Welds us as played strings sound one melody.
Where is the instrument whence the sounds flow?
And whose the master-hand that holds the bow?
O! Sweet song—

A beautiful collection of letters that is a great companion for every artist; each letter provides wisdom on the obstacles we all face, and provides insight into overcoming the inhibitors to our success. Letters to a young poet should be read by every artist; whether you are a healer, yogi, astrologist, reiki initiate, or poet this collection should be kept on your hip.