Not quite ripe

"Don't write love poems; avoid those forms that are too facile and ordinary: they are the hardest to work with, and it takes great, fully ripened power to create something individual where good, even glorious, traditions exist in abundance. So rescue yourself from these general themes and write about what your everyday life offers you; describe your sorrows and desires, the thoughts that pass through your mind and your belief in some kind of beauty - describe all these with heartfelt, silent, humble sincerity and, when you express yourself, use the Things around you, the images from your dreams, and the objects that you remember."

-- Rilke, letter one, Letters to a Young Poet

Why are the most poignant issues the most difficult to capure? Death. Love. Beauty. Truth. Perhaps it is their elusive quality that makes them so lovely. I'm not a good enough write to write about death. But how can I describe my daily little sorrow and joys, when all of them point back to that larger theme which I do not have the skill to sketch? I can't really describe what I'm feeling. I've been writing the post below over the last few days. Verbal dabblings. Crude lines. But it suggests the form of the emotions, my thoughts, that I have been carrying. Why make it public? I don't know. There is something to be said for publishing one's self. Something beyond a desire to draw attention to myself and pain, but something endemic to the healing process itself.

With that said, read on....