joy

is a meeting place, of deep intentionality and of self

forgetting, the bodily alchemy of what lies inside us in

communion with what formerly seemed outside, but

is now neither, but become a living frontier, a voice

speaking between us and the world: dance, laughter,

affection, skin touching skin, singing in the car, music

in the kitchen, the quiet irreplaceable and companionable

presence of a daughter: the sheer intoxicating 

beauty of the world inhabited as an edge between

what we previously thought was us and what we

thought was other than us. 

Joy can be made by practiced, hard-won achievement

as much as by an unlooked for, passing act of grace

arrived out of nowhere; joy is a measure of our

relationship to death and our living with death, joy is the 

act of giving ourselves away before we need to or are

asked to, joy is practiced generosity. If joy is a deep

form of love, it is also the raw engagement with the

passing seasonality of existence, the fleeting presence

of those we love understood as gift, going in and out

of our lives, faces, voices, memory, aromas of the first

spring day or a wood fire in winter, the last breath

of a dying parent as they create a rare, raw, beautiful

frontier between loving presence and a new and 

blossoming absence.

To feel a full and untrammeled joy is to have become

fully generous; to allow ourselves to be joyful is to

have walked through the doorway of fear, the dropping

away of the anxious worried self felt like a 

thankful death itself, a disappearance, a giving away,

overheard in the laughter of friendship, the vulnerability

of happiness felt suddenly as a strength, a solace

and a source, the claiming of our place in the living 

conversation, the sheer privilege of being in the

presence of a mountain, a sky or a well-loved familiar

face - I was here and you were here and together we

made a world.

David Whyte

Consolations

Photo: Peter Bowers

revelation must be terrible

 

Revelation must be

  terrible with no time left

to say goodbye.

Imagine that moment,

  staring at the still waters,

with only the brief tremor

of your body to say

  you are leaving everything

and everyone you know behind.

Being far from home is hard, but you know,

  at least we are all exiled together.

When you open your eyes to the world

you are on your own for

  the first time.  No one is

even interested in saving you now

and the world steps in

  to test the calm fluidity of your body

from moment to moment,

as if it believed you could join

  its vibrant dance

of fire and calmness and final stillness.

As if you were meant to be exactly 

  where you are, as if, 

like the dark branch of a desert river

you could flow on without a speck

  of guilt and everything

everywhere would still be just as it should be.

As if your place in the world mattered

  and the world could

neither speak nor hear the fullness of

its own bitter and beautiful cry

  without the deep well

of your body resonating in the echo.

Knowing it takes only

  that first, terrible 

word to make the circle complete,

revelation must be terrible

  knowing you can

never hide your voice again.

David Whyte

River Flow: New and Selected Poems

Photo: Peter Bowers

heartbreak

is unpreventable; the natural outcome of caring for people and things over which we have no control, of holding in our affections those who inevitably move beyond our line of sight.

Heartbreak begins the moment we are asked to let go but cannot, in other words, it colours and inhabits and magnifies each and every day; heartbreak is not a visitation, but a path that human beings follow through even the most average life.  Heartbreak is an indication of our sincerity: in love relationship, in a life's work, in trying to learn a musical instrument, in the attempt to shape a better more generous self. Heartbreak is the beautifully helpless side of love and affection and is just as much an essence and emblem of care as the spiritual athlete's quick but abstract ability to let go. Heartbreak has its own way of inhabiting time and its own beautiful and trying patience in coming and going.

Heartbreak is how we mature; yet we use the word heartbreak as if it only occurs when things have gone wrong: an unrequited love, a shattered dream, a child lost before their time. Heartbreak, we hope, is something we hope we can avoid; something to guard against, a chasm to be carefully looked for and then walked around; the hope is to find a way to place our feet where the elemental forces of life will keep us in the manner to which we want to be accustomed and which will keep us from the losses that all other human beings have experienced without exception since the beginning of conscious time. But heartbreak may be the very essence of being human, of being on the journey from here to there, and of coming to care deeply for what we find along the way.

Our hope to circumvent heartbreak in adulthood is beautifully and ironically child-like; heartbreak is as inescapable and inevitable as breathing, a part and parcel of every path, asking its due in every sincere course an individual takes, it may be that there may be not only no real life without the raw revelation of heartbreak, but no single path we can take within a life that will allow us to escape without having that imaginative organ we call the heart broken by what it holds and then has to let go.

In a sobering physical sense, every heart does eventually break, as the precipitating reason for death or because the rest of the body has given up before it and can no longer sustain its steady beat, but hearts also break in an imaginative and psychological sense: there is almost no path a human being can follow that does not lead to heartbreak. A marriage, a committed vow to another, even in the most settled, loving relationship, will always break our hearts at one time or another; a successful marriage has often had its heart broken many times just in order for the couple to stay together; parenthood, no matter the sincerity of our love for a child, will always break the mold of our motherly or fatherly hopes, a good work seriously taken, will often take everything we have and still leave us wanting; and finally even the most self compassionate, self examination should, if we are sincere, lead eventually to existential disappointment.

Realizing its inescapable nature, we can see heartbreak not as the end of the road or the cessation of hope but as the close embrace of the essence of what we have wanted or are about to lose.  It is the hidden DNA of our relationship with life, outlining outer forms even when we do not feel it by the intimate physical experience generated by it absence; it can also ground us truly in whatever grief we are experiencing, set us to planting a seed with what we have left or appreciate what we have built even as we stand in its ruins.

If heartbreak is inevitable and inescapable, it might be asking us to look for it and make friends with it, to see it as our constant and instructive companion, and perhaps, in the depth of its impact as well as in its hindsight, and even, its own reward.  Heartbreak asks us not to look for an alternative path, because there is no alternative path.  It is an introduction to what we love and have loved, an inescapable and often beautiful question, something and someone that has been with us all along, asking us to be ready for the ultimate letting go.





David Whyte

Consolations

The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words

Photo:  Peter Bowers

vulnerability

is not a weakness, a passing indisposition, or something we can arrange to do without, vulnerability is not a choice, vulnerability is the underlying, ever present and abiding undercurrent of our natural state. To run from vulnerability is to run from the essence of our nature, the attempt to be invulnerable is the vain attempt to become something we are not and most especially, to close off our understanding of the grief of others.  More seriously, in refusing our vulnerability we refuse the help needed at every turn of our existence and immobilize the essential, tidal and conversational foundations of our identity.

To have a temporary, isolated sense of power over all events and circumstances, is a lovely illusionary privilege and perhaps the prime and most beautifully constructed conceit of being human and especially of being youthfully human, but it is a privilege that must be surrendered with that same youth, with ill health, with accident, with the loss of loved ones who do not share our untouchable powers; powers eventually and most emphatically given up, as we approach our last breath.

The only choice we have as we mature is how we inhabit our vulnerability, how we become larger and more courageous and more compassionate through our intimacy with disappearance, our choice is to inhabit vulnerability as generous citizens of loss, robustly and fully, or conversely, as misers and complainers, reluctant and fearful, always at the gates of existence, but never bravely and completely attempting to enter, never wanting to risk ourselves, never walking fully through the door.





David Whyte
Consolations
The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words
Photo:  Peter Bowers

the bell and the blackbird

The sound
of a bell
still reverberating,

or a blackbird
calling
from a corner
of the
field.

Asking you
to wake
into this life
or inviting you
deeper
to one that waits.

Either way
takes courage,
either way wants you
to be nothing
but that self that
is no self at all,
wants you to walk
to the place
where you find
you already know
how to give
every last thing
away.

The approach
that is also
the meeting
itself,
without any
meeting
at all.

That radiance
you have always
carried with you
as you walk
both alone
and completely
accompanied
in friendship
by every corner
of the world
crying
Allelujah.





David Whyte
Photo:  Peter Bowers

Fire in the Earth

And we know, when Moses was told
      in the way that he was told,
"Take off your shoes," he grew pale from that simple

reminder of fire in the dusty earth.
      He never recovered
his complicated way of loving again

and was free to love in the same way
      the fire licking at his heels loved him.
As if the lion earth could roar

and take him in one movement.
      Every step he took
from there was carefully placed.

Everything he said mattered as if he knew
      the constant witness of the ground
and remembered his own face in the dust

the moment before revelation.
      Since then thousands have felt
the same immobile tongue with which he tried to speak.

Like the moment you too saw, for the first time,
      your own house turned to ashes.
Everything consumed so the road could open again.

Your entire presence in your eyes
      and the world turning slowly
into a single branch of flame.





David Whyte
Photo:  Peter Bowers

honesty

is reached through the doorway of grief and loss. Where we cannot go in our mind, our memory, or our body is where we cannot be straight with another, with the world, or with our self. The fear of loss, in one form or another, is the motivator behind all conscious and unconscious dishonesties: all of us are afraid of loss, in all its forms, all of us, at times, are haunted or overwhelmed by the possibility of a disappearance, and all of us therefore, are one short step away from dishonesty. Every human being dwells intimately close to a door of revelation they are afraid to pass through. Honesty lies in understanding our close and necessary relationship with not wanting to hear the truth.

The ability to speak the truth is as much the ability to describe what it is like to stand in trepidation at this door, as it is to actually go through it and become that beautifully honest spiritual warrior, equal to all circumstances, we would like to become. Honesty is not the revealing of some foundational truth that gives us power over life or another or even the self, but a robust incarnation into the unknown unfolding vulnerability of existence, where we acknowledge how powerless we feel, how little we actually know, how afraid we are of not knowing and how astonished we are by the generous measure of loss that is conferred upon even the most average life.

Honesty is grounded in humility and indeed in humiliation, and in admitting exactly where we are powerless. Honesty is not found in revealing the truth, but in understanding how deeply afraid of it we are. To become honest is in effect to become fully and robustly incarnated into powerlessness. Honesty allows us to live with not knowing. We do not know the full story, we do not know where we are in the story; we do not know who is at fault or who will carry the blame in the end. Honesty is not a weapon to keep loss and heartbreak at bay, honesty is the outer diagnostic of our ability to come to ground in reality, the hardest attainable ground of all, the place where we actually dwell, the living, breathing frontier where there is no realistic choice between gain or loss.






David Whyte
Consolations
The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words
Photo:  Peter Bowers

What to Remember When Waking

In that first hardly noticed moment in which you wake,

coming back to this life from the other

more secret, moveable and frighteningly honest world

where everything began,

there is a small opening into the new day

which closes the moment you begin your plans.

What you can plan is too small for you to live.

What you can live wholeheartedly will make plans enough

for the vitality hidden in your sleep.

To be human is to become visible

while carrying what is hidden as a gift to others.

To remember the other world in this world

is to live in your true inheritance.

You are not a troubled guest on this earth,

you are not an accident amidst other accidents

you were invited from another and greater night

than the one from which you have just emerged.

Now, looking through the slanting light of the morning window

toward the mountain presence of everything that can be

what urgency calls you to your one love?

What shape waits in the seed of you

to grow and spread its branches

against a future sky?

David Whyte 

Photo:  Peter Bowers

No Path

There is No Path that Goes all the Way 

Han Shan

Not that it stops us looking

for the full continuation.

The one line in the poem

we can start and follow

straight to the end.  The fixed belief

we can hold, facing a stranger

that saves us the trouble 

of a real conversation.

But one day you are not

just imagining an empty chair

where your loved one sat.

You are not just telling a story

where the bridge is down

and there's nowhere to cross.

You are not just trying to pray

to a God you imagined

would keep you safe.

No, you've come to the place

where nothing you've done

will impress and nothing you 

can promise will avert

the silent confrontation.

The place where

your body already seems to know

the way, having kept

to the last, its own secret

reconnaissance.

But still, there is no path

that goes all the way,

one conversation leads 

to another, 

one breath to the next

until

there's no breath at all, 

just

the inevitable 

final release

of the  burden.

And then, 

wouldn't your life

have to start 

all over again

for you to know

even a little 

of who you had been? 

David Whyte

Sweet Darkness

When your eyes are tired

the world is tired also.

When your vision has gone, 

no part of the world can find you.

Time to go into the dark 

where the night has eyes

to recognize its own.

There you can be sure

you are not beyond love.

The dark will be your home

tonight.

The night will give you a horizon

further than you can see.

You must learn one thing.

The  world was made to be free in.

Give up all the other worlds

except the one to which you belong.

Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet

confinement of your aloneness

to learn

anything or anyone 

that does not bring you alive

is too small for you.

David Whyte

Photo:  Peter Bowers

The Opening of Eyes

That day I saw beneath the dark clouds

The passing light over the water

And I heard the voice of the world speak out

I knew then as I have before

Life is no passing memory of what has been

Nor the remaining pages of a great book

Waiting to be read

It is the opening of eyes long closed

It is the vision of far off things

Seen for the silence they hold

It is the heart after years of secret conversing

Speaking out loud in the clear air

It is Moses in the desert fallen to his knees

Before the lit bush

It is the man throwing away his shoes

As if to enter heaven and finding himself astonished

Opened at last

Fallen in love

With solid ground

David Whyte

image: Peter Bowers

What to Remember When Waking

In that first hardly noticed moment in which you wake,
coming back to this life from the other,
more secret, movable and frighteningly honest world
where everything began,
there is a small opening into the new day
which closes the moment you begin your plans.

What you can plan is too small for you to live.

What you can live wholeheartedly
will make plans enough for the vitality
hidden in your sleep.

To be human is to become visible
while carrying what is hidden
as a gift to others.

To remember the other world in this world
is to live in your true inheritance.

You are not a troubled guest on this earth,
you are not an accident amidst other accidents.
You were invited from another and greater night
than the one from which you have just emerged.

Now looking through
the slanting light of the morning window
toward the mountain presence
of everything that can be,
what urgency calls you to your one love?
What shape waits in the seed of you
to grow and spread its branches
against a future sky?

David Whyte

Photo:  Peter Bowers

Arrivals

Imagine the confines of a long grey corridor

just before immigration at Washington Dulles

airport.  Imagine two Ethiopian women amid

a sea of familiar international plastic blandness,

entering America for the first time.  Think of

their undulating multi-coloured turbans raised

atop graceful heads, transforming us,

a grey line of travelers behind them, into followers

and mendicants, mere drab, impatient, moneyed

and perplexed attendants to their bright,

excited, chattering arrival.

Imagine a sharp plexi-glass turn left and suddenly

before them, in biblical astonishment, like a vertical

red sea churning, like the waters barring Moses from

The Promised Land, like Jacob standing before his ladder,

a moving escalator, a mode of rising, a form of ascension,

a way to go up they'd never seen before, its steel grey

interlocking invitation on and up to who knows what,

bringing them and everyone behind them, to a bemused,

complete, and utter standstill.

So that you saw it for the first time as they saw it

and for what it was, a grated river of lifting steel,

an involuntary, moving ascension into who knows what.

An incredible surprise.  And you knew, even through

your tiredness, why it made them raise their hands

to their mouths, why it made them give low breathy

screams of surprise and delighted terror.  You saw it

as they saw it, a staircase of invisible interlocking

beckoning hands asking them to rise up

independent of their history, their legs or their wills.

And we stopped as we knew we had to now

and watched the first delighted be-turbaned

woman put a sandaled foot on the flat grey

plain at the foot of the moving stair and sure

enough quickly withdraw it with a strangled scream,

leaving her sandal to ascend strangely without her

into heaven, into America, into her new life.

Then, holding her friend away, who tried to grab

her, to save her, to hold her back, who pointed

and shouted, telling her not to risk herself,

not to be foolish, she silently watched her shoe,

that willful child, running ahead, its sole intent

to enter the country oblivious to visas and immigration,

above the need for a job, uncaring of healthcare,

pointing toward some horizon she had never dreamt,

intent on leaving only its winged footprint

for her to follow, like a comet's tail, like an omen

of necessity, like a signaled courage, like an uncaring

invitation, to make her entrance with soul and style.

Because she looked up at this orphaned, onward

messenger with her eyes a-blaze, threw off the panicked

clamoring arms of her friend, raised her chin

in noble profile, and with all that other hurrying

clamor of the world behind her, with a busy,

unknowing, corporate crowd at her back and questions

beginning to be asked out loud, she lifted her arms,

clapped her hands, threw back her head and with

a queenly unbidden grace, strode on to the ascending

heaven bound steel like a newly struck film star,

singing the old, high pitched song her children

would hear when she told the story again. 

And as her friend below sang,

applauded, danced on the spot

and ululated her companion's arrival,

we stood there behind her,

transfixed, travel weary,

and crammed into the corridor

like extras from some

miraculous scene in the bible.

While

she ascended,

her arms straight out,

wide eyed and singing,

into America.

David Whyte

 

Everything is Waiting for You

Your great mistake is to act the drama
as if you were alone. As if life
were a progressive and cunning crime
with no witness to the tiny hidden
transgressions. To feel abandoned is to deny
the intimacy of your surroundings. Surely,
even you, at times, have felt the grand array;
the swelling presence, and the chorus, crowding
out your solo voice.  You must note
the way the soap dish enables you,
or the window latch grants you freedom.
Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity.
The stairs are your mentor of things
to come, the doors have always been there
to frighten you and invite you,
and the tiny speaker in the phone
is your dream-ladder to divinity.
Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into
the conversation. The kettle is singing
even as it pours you a drink, the cooking pots
have left their arrogant aloofness and
seen the good in you at last. All the birds
and creatures of the world are unutterably
themselves. Everything is waiting for you.

David Whyte



The Poet

moves forward

to that edge

but lives sensibly,

through the senses

not because of them.

Above all he watches

where he steps.

As if it matters

where he leaves his prints.

The senses overwhelm him

at his peril.

Though he must be taken

by something greater.

That is what he uses

senses to perceive.

The poet's

task is simple

He looks for quiet,

and speaks to what

he finds there. 

But like Blake
in his engraving shop, works
with the fierceness
of acid on metal.

Melting apparent
surfaces away
and displaying
the infinite
which was hid.

In the early morning
he listens
by the window,
makes
the first utterance
and tries to overhear
himself
say something,
from which
in that silence,
it is impossible to retreat. 

David Whyte

photo:  Peter Bowers

Farewell Letter

She wrote me a letter

after her death

and I remember

a kind of happy light

falling on the envelope

as I sat by the rose tree,

on her old bench

at the back door,

so surprised by its arrival,

wondering what she would say,

looking up before I could open it

and laughing to myself

in silent expectation.

Dear son, it is time

for me to leave you.

I am afraid that the words

you are used to hearing

are no longer mine to give,

they are gone and mingled

back in the world

where it is no longer

in my power

to be their first

original author

nor their last

loving bearer.

You can hear

motherly

words of affection now

only from your own mouth

and only

when you speak them

to those who stand

motherless

before you.

As for me I must forsake

adulthood

and be bound gladly

to a new childhood.

You must understand

this apprenticeship

demands of me

an elemental innocence

from everything

I ever held in my hands.

I know your generous soul

is well able to let me go,

you will in the end

be happy to know

my God was true

and I find myself

after loving you all so long,

in the wide,

infinite mercy

of being mothered myself.

P.S.  All your intuitions were true. 



David Whyte