living and writing in heat....

    And let me promptly make a request: read as little as possible of aesthetic criticism-such things are either partisan views, petrified and grown seseless in their lifeless infudration, or they are clever quibblings in which today one view wins and tomorrow the opposite.  Works of art are of an infinite lonelinesss and with nothing so little to be reached as with criticism.  Only love can grasp and hold and be just toward them.  Consider yourself and your feeling right every time with regard to every such argumentation, discussion or introduction; if you are wrong after all, the natural growth of your inner life will lead you slowly and with time to other insights.  Leave to your opinions their own quiet undisturbed development, which, like 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 mearusring with time, no year matters, and ten years are nothing.  Being an artists 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!

-rainer maria rilke

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African Proverbs translated in Mandarin on Chinese Factory Floors

Every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up
It knows it must run faster than the fastest lion or it will be killed
Every morning a lion wakes up.
It knows it must outrun the slowest gazelle or it will starve to death
It doesn't matter whether you are a lion or gazelle
When the sun comes up, you better start running