Inspiration

I once had a mentor tell me,
"Now that you're in college you might not get to hang out with someone once a week to find inspiration and talk about stuff. Find mentors through history; writers and historical figures that can provide this kind of inspiration." 
Granted, I still have mentors I meet with occasionally, and this kind of mentoring has it's own value that cannot be replaced by a distant historical figure. But here are some people that speak to my soul from time to time. Here are their words. 






SHARON OLDS


Sex Without Love 
Sharon Olds


How do they do it, the ones who make love
without love? Beautiful as dancers,
gliding over each other like ice-skaters
over the ice, fingers hooked
inside each other's bodies, faces
red as steak, wine, wet as the
children at birth whose mothers are going to
give them away. How do they come to the
come to the come to the God come to the
still waters, and not love
the one who came there with them, light
rising slowly as steam off their joined
skin? These are the true religious,
the purists, the pros, the ones who will not
accept a false Messiah, love the
priest instead of the God. They do not
mistake the lover for their own pleasure,
they are like great runners: they know they are alone
with the road surface, the cold, the wind,
the fit of their shoes, their over-all cardio-
vascular health--just factors, like the partner
in the bed, and not the truth, which is the
single body alone in the universe
against its own best time




RAINER MARIA RILKE
LETTERS TO A YOUNG POET


You ask whether your verses are good.  you ask me.  you have asked other before.  you send them to magazines.  You compare them with other poems, and you are disturbed when certain editors rejects your efforts.  Now (since you have allowed me to advise you) I beg you to give up all that.  you are looking outward, and that above all you should not do now.  Nobody can counsel and help you, nobody.  There is only one single way.  Go into yourself.  Search for the reason that bids you write; find out whether it is spreading out its roots in the deepest places of your heart, acknowledge to yourself whether you would have to die it it were denied you to write.  This above all--ask yourself in the stillest hour of your night: must I write? Delve into yourself for a deep answer.  And it this should be affirmative, if you may meet this earnest question with a strong and simple 'I must,' then build your life according to this necessity; your life even into its most indifferent and slightest hour must be a sign of this urge and a testimony to it.