gestation

I have really been captured by a Rilke quote this week.  It has helped me to be really attentive to whatever life God is growing in me these days.  I wonder if sometimes I don't try to rush a process that cannot be rushed, wanting it, whatever it is, to be born before it is ready to come forth.  Anyway, here's the quote:

Everything is gestation and then bringing forth.  To let each impression and each germ of a feeling come to completion wholly in itself, in the dark, in the inexpressible, the unconscious, beyond the reach of one’s own intelligence, and await with deep humility and patience the birth-hour of a new clarity: that alone is living the artist’s life: in understanding as in creating. 

     There is here no measuring with time, no year matters, and ten years are nothing.  Being an artist means, not reckoning and counting, but ripening like the tree which does not force its sap and stands confident in the storms of spring without the fear that after them may come no summer.  It does come.  But it comes only to the patient, who are there as though eternity lay before them, so unconcernedly still and wide, I learn it daily, learn it with pain to which I am grateful: patience is everything! (Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke)

It has caused me to ask myself a few questions this week: What is growing in me these days?  How am I giving it time and space and attention to become whatever it is intended to be?  Will I resist the temptation to rush it from conception to delivery and give it time and space and prayer to grow and develop?

New birth, it seems, cannot be rushed or forced.