Worth the wait

Three words continue to come up in my career and life as an artist: preparation, persistence, and patience.
I am not by nature a patient person.
When I attended the School at Steppenwolf, we started the entire summer with this quote by Rilke:

…all progress, must come from deep within and cannot be pressed or hurried by anything. 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 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!

The first time I read this quote I didn’t fully understand it’s wisdom. I loved it though, if for no other reason than it seemed to defuse the responsibility and pressure to be instantly fabulous. It wasn’t until two years later when SiNNERMAN put up it’s inaugural show that I started to appreciate this kind of patience.
We all worked terribly hard. Sometimes together. Sometimes not. But when we stopped trying to work together and started playing together and trusting each other we gave birth to something that had been conceived two summers ago. It took two years but our lives seasoned our play. And it was beautiful. I guess this whole patience thing isn’t so bad after all.