All the True Vows

 

All the true vows
are secret vows
the ones we speak out loud
are the ones we break.

There is only one life
you can call your own
and a thousand others
you can call by any name you want.

Hold to the truth you make
every day with your own body,
don’t turn your face away.

Hold to your own truth
at the center of the image
you were born with.

Those who do not understand
their destiny will never understand
the friends they have made
nor the work they have chosen

nor the one life that waits
beyond all the others.

By the lake in the wood
in the shadows
you can
whisper that truth
to the quiet reflection
you see in the water.

Whatever you hear from
the water, remember,

it wants you to carry
the sound of its truth on your lips.

Remember,
in this place
no one can hear you

and out of the silence
you can make a promise
it will kill you to break,

that way you’ll find
what is real and what is not.

I know what I am saying.
Time almost forsook me
and I looked again.

Seeing my reflection
I broke a promise
and spoke
for the first time
after all these years

in my own voice,

before it was too late
to turn my face again.

--David Whyte

See with Every Turning Day

 

See with every turning day,

how each season wants to make

a child of you again, wants you to become

a seeker after rainfall and birdsong,

watch how it weathers you to a testing

in the tried and true, tells you

with each falling leaf, to leave and slip away,

even from the branch that held you,

to be courageous, to go when you need to,

to be like that last word you’d want to say

before you leave the world.

--David Whyte

Sometimes

Sometimes

if you move carefully

through the forest,

breathing

like the ones

in the old stories,

who could cross

a shimmering

bed of leaves

without a sound,

you come

to a place

whose only task

is to trouble you

with tiny

but frightening requests,

conceived out of nowhere

but in this place

beginning to lead everywhere.

Requests to stop

what you are doing

right now,

and

to stop what you

are becoming

while you do it,

questions

that can make

or unmake

a life,

questions

that have patiently

waited for you,

questions

that have no right

to go away.

--David Whyte

[Krista Tippett's Ted Talk on Living the Questions].

https://www.instagram.com/reel/CyOcTu8B2IP/?igshid=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==

At Home

 

At home amidst
the bees
wandering
the garden
in the summer
light
the sky
a broad roof
for the house
of contentment
where I wish
to
live forever
in the eternity
of my own
fleeting
and momentary
happiness.

I walk toward
the kitchen
door as if walking
toward the
door of a recognized
heaven

and see the
simplicity
of shelves and
the blue dishes
and the
vapouring 
steam rising
from the kettle
that called me in.

Not just this
aromatic cup
from which to drink
but the flavour
of a life made whole
and lovely
through the
imagination
seeking its way.

Not just this
house around me
but the arms
of a fierce
but healing world.

Not just this line
I write
but the
innocence
of an earned
forgiveness
flowing again
through hands
made new with
writing.

And a man
with no company
but his house,
his garden,
and his own
well peopled solitude,

entering
the silences
and chambers
of the heart
to start again.

--David Whyte

[Photos of a perfect summer day here in Vermont.]

Blessing for the Light

 

I thank you, light, again,

for helping me to find

the outline of my daughter’s face.

I thank you light, for the subtle way

your merest touch gives shape

to such things I could

only learn to love

through your delicate instruction.

And I thank you, this morning

waking again,

most intimately and secretly

for your visible invisibility,

the way you make me look

at the face of the world

so that everything, becomes

an eye to everything else

and so that strangely,

I also see myself being seen.

So that I can be born again

in that sight, so that

I can have this one other way

along with every other way,

to know that I am here.

—David Whyte

[Our children and grandchildren with my mother, October 2022]

One Day

 
One day I will
say
the gift I once had
has been taken.

The place I have
made for myself
belongs to another,

and the words
I have sung
are being sung 
by the ones
I would want.

Then I will be ready
for that voice
and the still silence
in which it arrives.

And if my faith is good
then we'll meet again
on the road
and we'll be thirsty
and stop
and laugh 
and drink
together again

from the deep well
of things as they are.

--David Whyte

[Photo in remembrance of my stepdad, Robert Weigle, who died 12-21-19].

Farewell Letter

(For All the Mothers Who Have Passed Away)

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

not 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

[Photo with my mother-in-law and 4th-grade teacher!]

Blessings for the Morning Light

The blessing of the morning light to you,

may it find you even in your invisible

appearances, may you be seen to have risen

from some other place you know and have known

in the darkness and that that carries all you need.

May you see what is hidden in you

as a place of hospitality and shadowed shelter,

may what is hidden in you become your gift to give,

may you hold that shadow to the light

and the silence of that shelter to the word of the light,

may you join every previous disappearance

with this new appearance, this new morning,

this being seen again, new and newly alive.

—David Whyte

Our Life Like a Breath

Our life,

like a breath

then,

a coming

and a going,

a bridge,

a central movement,

between singing

a separate self

and learning

to be selfless.

--David Whyte , excerpt from "A Seeming Stillness"

[Photo of our twins, Douglas and Danielle, with "cousin" Petra.]

Despair

Despair takes us in when we have nowhere else to go; when we feel the heart cannot break anymore, when our world or our loved ones disappear, when we feel we cannot be loved or do not deserve to be loved, when our God disappoints, or when our body is carrying profound pain in a way that does not seem to go away.

Despair is a haven with its own temporary form of beauty and of self-compassion, it is the invitation we accept when we want to remove ourselves from hurt. Despair, is a last protection. To disappear through despair, is to seek a temporary but necessary illusion, a place where we hope nothing can ever find us in the same way again.

Despair is a necessary and seasonal state of repair, a temporary healing absence, an internal physiological and psychological winter when our previous forms of participation in the world take a rest; it is a loss of horizon, it is the place we go when we do not want to be found in the same way anymore. We give up hope when certain particular wishes are no longer able to come true and despair is the time in which we both endure and heal, even when we have not yet found the new form of hope.

Despair is strangely, the last bastion of hope; the wish being, that if we cannot be found in the old way we cannot ever be touched or hurt in that way again. Despair is the sweet but illusory abstraction of leaving the body while still inhabiting it, so we can stop the body from feeling anymore. Despair is the place we go when we no longer want to make a home in the world and where we feel, with a beautifully cruel form of satisfaction, that we may never have deserved that home in the first place. Despair, strangely, has its own sense of achievement, and despair, even more strangely, needs despair to keep it alive.

Despair turns to depression and abstraction when we try to make it stay beyond its appointed season and start to shape our identity around its frozen disappointments. But despair can only stay beyond its appointed time through the forced artificiality of created distance, by abstracting ourselves from bodily feeling, by trapping ourselves in the disappointed mind, by convincing ourselves that the seasons have stopped and can never turn again, and perhaps, most simply and importantly, by refusing to let the body breathe by its self, fully and deeply. Despair is kept alive by freezing our sense of time and the rhythms of time; when we no longer feel imprisoned by time, and when the season is allowed to turn, despair cannot survive.

To keep despair alive we have to abstract and immobilize our bodies, our faculties of hearing, touch and smell, and keep the surrounding springtime of the world at a distance. Despair needs a certain tending, a reinforcing, and isolation, but the body left to itself will breathe, the ears will hear the first birdsong of morning or catch the leaves being touched by the wind in the trees, and the wind will blow away even the grayest cloud; will move even the most immovable season; the heart will continue to beat and the world, we realize, will never stop or go away.

The antidote to despair is not to be found in the brave attempt to cheer ourselves up with happy abstracts, but in paying a profound and courageous attention to the body and the breath, independent of our imprisoning thoughts and stories, even strangely, in paying attention to despair itself, and the way we hold it, and which we realize, was never ours to own and to hold in the first place. To see and experience despair fully in our body is to begin to see it as a necessary, seasonal visitation, and the first step in letting it have its own life, neither holding it nor moving it on before its time.

We take the first steps out of despair by taking on its full weight and coming fully to ground in our wish not to be here. We let our bodies and we let our world breathe again. In that place, strangely, despair cannot do anything but change into something else, into some other season, as it was meant to do, from the beginning. Despair is a difficult, beautiful necessary, a binding understanding between human beings caught in a fierce and difficult world where half of our experience is mediated by loss, but it is a season, a wave form passing through the body, not a prison surrounding us. A season left to itself will always move, however slowly, under its own patience, power and volition.

Refusing to despair about despair itself, we can let despair have its own natural life and take a first step onto the foundational ground of human compassion, the ability to see and understand and touch and even speak, the heartfelt grief of another.

--David Whyte from Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words

Tobar Phadraic (Patrick's Well)

Turn sideways into the light as they say
the old ones did and disappear
into the originality of it all.

Be impatient with easy explanations
and teach that part of the mind
that wants to know everything
not to begin questions it cannot answer.

Walk the green road above the bay
and the low glinting fields
toward the evening sun, let that Atlantic
gleam be ahead of you and the gray light
of the bay below you, until you catch,
down on your left, the break in the wall,
for just above in the shadows
you’ll find it hidden, a curved arm
of rock holding the water close to the mountain,
a just-lit surface smoothing a scattering of coins,
and in the niche above, notes to the dead
and supplications for those who still live
.
But for now, you are alone with the transfiguration
and ask no healing for your own
but look down as if looking through time,
as if through a rent veil from the other
side of the question you’ve refused to ask.

And you remember now, that clear stream
of generosity from which you drank,
how as a child your arms could rise and your palms
turn out to take the blessing of the world.

--David Whyte

[Poulnabrone dolmen, a megalithic portal tomb, on the Burren in County Clare, Ireland]

There is No Path that Goes all the Way

'There is No Path that Goes all the Way'
Han Shan

Not that it stops us looking
for the full continuation.

The first 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 always imagined
would keep you safe.

No, you’ve come to a 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

There is a Road Always Beckoning

There is a road
always
beckoning.

When you see
the two sides
of it
closing together
at that far horizon

and deep in
the foundations
of your own
heart
at exactly
the same
time,

that’s how
you know
it's where
you
have
to go.

That’s how
you know
it’s the road
you
have
to follow.

That’s
how you know.

It’s just beyond
yourself,

it’s
where you
need to be.

--David Whyte

[Photo from 

Thingvellir National Park, Iceland in Feb. 2020]

SELF-PORTRAIT

It doesn’t interest me if there is one God
or many gods.

I want to know if you belong or feel
abandoned,

if you can know despair or see it in others.
I want to know

if you are prepared to live in the world
with its harsh need

to change you. If you can look back
with firm eyes,

saying this is where I stand. I want to know
if you know

how to melt into that fierce heat of living,
falling toward

the center of your longing. I want to know
if you are willing

to live, day by day,
with the consequence of love

and the bitter
unwanted passion of your sure defeat.

I have heard, in that fierce embrace, even
the gods speak of God.

--David Whyte

There is a Road Always Beckoning

There is a road
always
beckoning.

When you see
the two sides
of it
closing together
at that far horizon
and deep in
foundations
of your own
heart
at exactly
the same
time,
that’s how
you know
it's where
you
have
to go.

That’s how
you know
it’s the road
you
have
to follow.

That’s how
you know
you have
to go.

That’s
how you know.

It’s just beyond
yourself,

it’s
where you
need to be.

--David Whyte

TWICE BLESSED

So that
I stopped
there
and looked
into the sun,

seeing not only
my reflected face
but the great sky
that framed
my lonely figure

and after a moment
I lifted my hands
and then my eyes
and I
allowed myself
to be

astonished
by the great
everywhere
calling to me
like an
invisible
and unspoken
invitation,
like something
in one moment
both calling to me
and radiating
from where I stood,

as if I could
encompass
everything
I had been given
and everything
taken from me

as if I could be
everything
I have learned
and everything
I could know,

as if I knew
in that moment
both the way
I had come
and, secretly,

the way
I was still
promised to go,

brought together,
like this,
with the
unyielding ground
and the symmetry
of the moving sky,
caught in still waters.

Someone
I have been,
and someone
I am just,
about to become,

something I am
and will be forever,
the sheer generosity
of being loved
through loving:
the miracle reflection
of a twice blessed life.

--David Whyte from 

Work in Progress

Vulnerability

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.

--David Whyte (from book Consolations)

LEARNING TO WALK

Walked out this morning
into a broad green garden
with the rising sun in my eyes
and the first hint of the day’s heat
touching my face,
feeling as broad as the garden
and young as the day
and soaking up the heat
in my black tee-shirt,
walked straight forward
out of the gate,
through the wood,
along the river,
toward the mountain
and thought of the future
I could make in the world
if I walked toward it
like this,
with my face toward the hills
and my eyes full of light
and the earth sure
and solid beneath me,
walking on
with a fierce anticipation,
and a faithful expectation,
with the sun and the rain
and the wind on my skin…

--David Whyte

Just Beyond Yourself

There is a road
always
beckoning.

When you see
the two sides
of it
closing together
at that far horizon
and deep in
the foundations
your own
heart
at exactly
the same
time,

that’s how
you know
it's where
you
have
to go.

That’s how
you know
it’s the road
you
have
to follow.

That’s how
you know
you have
to go.

That’s
how you know.

It’s just beyond
yourself,
it’s
where you
need to be.

--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