No One Told Me

 

shutterstock

 

No one told me

it would lead to this.

No one said

there would be secrets

I would not want to know.

No one told me about seeing,

seeing brought me

loss and a darkness I could not hold.

No one told me about writing

or speaking.

Speaking and writing poetry

I unsheathed the sharp edge

of experience that led me here.

No one told me

it could not be put away.

I was told once, only,

in a whisper,

“The blade is so sharp—

It cuts things together

—not apart.”

This is no comfort.

My future is full of blood,

from being blindfold,

hands outstretched,

feeling a way along its firm edge.

David Whyte

Orphan Lamb

 

pngtree

A black lamb centered in a green field,

his thin breathed-into sides confirming

his bereft call for milk amongst the bedraggled

white fleeced mothers, looking on,

who stood and watched, not hearing

‘plaintive’ or ‘lost’ or ‘waiting to be fed’

but the cry of another mother’s son

needing to find his own way back

to the flow-source of milk and the warm

fleece hug of his mother’s belly

swaying above the teat. They would stand

above his black skeletal form beneath the trees

dropping their heads to drive him off

and stamp and turn again, nudging their own

half hesitant, half happy lambs away.

We walked the fields an hour looking

for a mother standing alone or with a single lamb,

the burnt sun falling to a misted light,

the trees become silhouettes, black as the lamb itself,

our eyes and ears in the crowded field

bent to the ancient prayer rising around us,

the evensong of grief and motherhood,

call and response, wanting and not wanting,

the church bell call of a passing rook

sounding the hour as the last pale

just burnt gold of a cloud framed

our shadows, walking the lit vale

toward the car, toward loss, toward

something in our low disappointed voices

trying to remember from childhood both

the sense of source and the act of being pushed away,

where we were wanted and where we were not.

In the end, we took him home, to a waiting mother

who had lost her own, penned in a barn,

her grown head turned away in the wooden crush

so the lamb could drink and hours later

in the sweet hay strewn dark of the enclosing barn

the mother ewe could smell her own milk

tasted through the lamb’s own breath

their mutual life come to life by self-recognition,

the black lamb pulling mightily at the dugs

as the mother looked on, as we looked on,

and looked at one another

passing the tiny airline bottle,

the faint breath of whisky from our nip

misting and pluming in the half-lit barn.

The single, full malt taste of something met,

a breathing through in the chest, a way of coming to

and of tasting again, the essence of wanting to live,

something paid for by our seeking and our patience,

just a tang, a hint, a mere breath in the glow light,

of being born again.

David Whyte

in, The Bell and the Blackbird

Sweet Darkness

 

Wallpapers

 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

in, The House of Belonging

Twice Blessed

 

Yuri Arcurs

So that I stopped

there

and looked

into the waters

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 old

and unspoken

invitation,

made new

by the sun

and the spring,

and the cloud

and the light,

like something

both

calling to me

and radiating

from where I stood,

as if I could

understand

everything

I had been given

and everything ever

taken from me,

as if I could be

everything I have ever

learned

and everything

I could ever know,

as if I knew

both the way I had come

and, secretly,

the way

underneath

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

STILL POSSIBLE

 

Fulmandi

It is still possible to be kind to yourself,

to drop constraints and fall often

to your knees, it’s not too late now, to bow

to what beckons, the world still swimming

around you as you kneel transfigured

by what sweeps on, it’s still possible

to leave every fearful former self

in the wake of newly-heard words

issuing from an astonished mouth.

It’s still possible to feel your body

as fully here and fully you, but not

quite your own, to find you can live

both entirely as yourself and in

the lovely anonymous multitude

of elements around you, that you

have always been a brother and sister

to the clouds beyond the window;

or have lived your secret, unspoken

marriage with the pale blue sky

for more years than you could ever

remember; and that you have always

been proud to be, through all

your difficulties, a loyal companion

and friend to the foaming tide,

coming and going, appearing

and disappearing with you,

and for you, day after day

on the ceaseless shore.

It’s still possible amongst all the never ending 

movement to hold the necessary anchorage, 

while having a mind for the long migration,

to be ready to up and go and then surprisingly, 

be gone:

 

It’s not too late to imagine that the days 

to come are the lost children you are still 

to bring to birth and bring to maturity, 

and that you are ready once more to be 

selfless on their behalf, setting them to rights 

when they fall, listening when they lose 

faith, being that mother or father, 

who through all their difficulties, 

gives the gift of constant witness. 

It’s still possible to intuit a magnificent, 

individual arrival, that brings you still 

closer to the accompanying faraway crowd; 

to live bravely and always, as someone said,

‘to the point of tears’, to realize that you 

have always had your life shattered 

and your heart broken and your faith 

tested by loving too much and too often 

and that all along, it was never too much 

and never too often, and that you were 

never, ever, fully broken.

Yes, it’s still possible not to hold so tightly

to what you think is true, to bend your head

and assume humility beneath the eaves

of a still spreading sky, to feel in the rain

upon your upturned face, how you have

always been friends with the distant

horizon, no matter how far and how

faint its call.

Yes, it’s still possible to be a soul

on its way to a beautiful, beckoning

and bountiful somewhere,

looking for the gift you will bring back

to the time of your birth, 

so that you can start living again, 

from the very first moment you came into this life,

but this time with the cleaner, 

earned simplicity of knowing what it has taken you so long to learn: 

to ask for forgiveness by being forgiveness: 

to live more generously, by greeting yourself more generously, 

and then to dance more bravely, 

to speak more suddenly,

and with a free heart, 

to undo as you go all you do wrong, 

and to right the wronged

and unsettle the self-righteous, 

sharing the secret to happiness with everyone.

Yes, oh yes, it’s still possible to taste

the natural God-given sweetness

in every cloud in the sky, in every little

you eat; in every breath that you take,

in every hand that you touch, in every day

that you wake, in every tear that you shed,

in every voice still waiting to call you,

in every once solid, immoveable door,

now calling you through; and in every

single blessed moment turning to the next.

It’s still possible to fully understand

you have always been the place

where the miracle has happened:

that you have been since your birth

the bread given and the wine lifted,

the change witnessed and the change itself,

that you have been all along,

a goodness that can continue

to be a goodness to itself.

It’s still possible in the end

to realize why you are here

and why you have endured,

and why you might have suffered

so much, so that in the end,

you could witness love, miraculously

arriving from nowhere, crossing

bravely as it does, out of darkness,

from that great and spacious stillness

inside you, to the simple,

light-filled life of being said.

David Whyte

in, STILL POSSIBLE

The journey

 

Posterlounge

Above the mountains

the geese turn into

the light again

Painting their

black silhouettes

on an open sky.

Sometimes everything

has to be

enscribed across

the heavens

so you can find

the one line

already written

inside you.

Sometimes it takes

a great sky

to find that

small, bright

and indescribable

wedge of freedom

in your own heart.

Sometimes with

the bones of the black

sticks left when the fire

has gone out

someone has written

something new

in the ashes of your life.

You are not leaving

you are arriving.

David Whyte 

Everything is waiting for you

 

Greg Rakozy

 

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

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 womb

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

Where Many Rivers Meet

 

Iceland's Fjallsjökull Glacier

 All the water below me came from above.

All the clouds living in the mountains

gave it to the rivers

who gave it to the sea, which was their dying.

?

And so I float on cloud become water,

central sea surrounded by white mountains,

the water salt, once fresh,

clouds fall and streams rush, tree root and tide bank

leading to the rivers' mouths

and the mouths of the rivers sing into the sea,

the stories buried in the mountains

give out into the sea

and the sea remembers

and sings back

from the depth

where nothing is forgotten

David Whyte

Leaving the Island

 

Steven Michael

It must have been

the slant of the light,

the sheer cross-grain of rain

against the summer sun,

the way the island appeared

gifted, out of the gleam

and the depth of distance,

so that when you turned

to look again,

the scend of the sea

had carried you on,

under the headland

and into the waiting harbour.

And after the pilgrim lanes,

and the ruined chapel,

the lads singing beneath the window,

and the Corn-Crake calling from

a corner of a field,

after the gull cries and the sea-hush

at the back of the island,

it was the way, standing still

or looking out,

walking or even talking

with others in the evening bar,

holding your drink

and laughing with the rest,

that you realized–part of you

had already dropped to its knees,

to pray, to sing, to look–

to fall in love with everything

and everyone again, that someone

from deep inside you had come out

into the sea-light to raise its hands

and forgive everyone in your short life

you thought you hadn’t, and that all along

you had been singing your quiet way

through the rosary of silence

that held their names.

Above all, the way afterwards,

you thought you had left the island

but hadn’t, the way you knew

you had gone somewhere

into the shimmering light

and come out again on the tide

as you knew you had to,

as someone who would return

and live in the world again,

a man granted just a glimpse,

a woman granted just a glimpse,

some one half a shade braver,

a standing silhouette in the stern,

holding the rail,

riding the long waves back,

ready for the exile we call a home.

David Whyte

Santiago

 

Freepik

The road seen, then not seen, the hillside

hiding then revealing the way you should take,

the road dropping away from you as if leaving you

to walk on thin air, then catching you, holding you up,

when you thought you would fall,

and the way forward always in the end

the way that you followed, the way that carried you

into your future, that brought you to this place,

no matter that it sometimes took your promise from you,

no matter that it had to break your heart along the way:

the sense of having walked from far inside yourself

out into the revelation, to have risked yourself

for something that seemed to stand both inside you

and far beyond you, that called you back

to the only road in the end you could follow, walking

as you did, in your rags of love and speaking in the voice

that by night became a prayer for safe arrival,

so that one day you realized that what you wanted

had already happened long ago and in the dwelling place

you had lived in before you began,

and that every step along the way, you had carried

the heart and the mind and the promise

that first set you off and drew you on and that you were

more marvelous in your simple wish to find a way

than the gilded roofs of any destination you could reach:

as if, all along, you had thought the end point might be a city

with golden towers, and cheering crowds,

and turning the corner at what you thought was the end

of the road, you found just a simple reflection,

and a clear revelation beneath the face looking back

and beneath it another invitation, all in one glimpse:

like a person and a place you had sought forever,

like a broad field of freedom that beckoned you beyond;

like another life, and the road still stretching on.

David Whyte

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 day

that 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?

Is it waiting

in the fertile sea?

In the trees

beyond the house?

In the life

you can imagine

for yourself?

In the open

and lovely

white page

on the waiting desk?

David Whyte

in,The House of Belonging

Just Beyond Yourself

Flickr

 

Just beyond

yourself.

It’s where

you need

to be.

Half a step

into

self-forgetting

and the rest

restored

by what

you’ll meet.

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 the road

you

have

to follow.

That’s how

you know

it’s where

you

have

to go.

That’s how

you know

you have

to go.

That’s

how you know.

Just beyond

yourself,

it’s

where you

need to be.

David Whyte

Prayer for an Invitation

 

 I pray for you, world

to come and find me,

to see me and recognize me

and beckon me out,

to call me

even when I lose

the ability to call on

you who have searched

so long for me.

I pray to understand

the stranger inside me

who will emerge in the end

to take your gift.

I pray for the world

to find me

in its own wise way.

I pray to be wanted

and needed

by those I have

learned to love

and those

I must learn to love.

I pray to be wanted

and needed

by those I cannot

recognize

in my self-imposed

aloneness.

And

I pray to be wanted

and needed

by those

I wish to be wanted by.

But I acknowledge

the power of your beautiful

disguise, and I ask

for the patient heart

of all things

to understand

the uncertain, abiding

and intimate invitation

in my fear of leaving,

in my fear of arriving,

in my fear of taking your hand

to follow

that hidden, difficult

and forever beckoning way.

David Whyte

in, The Bell and the Blackbird 

Sharing the Grail

 

 When we arrive, and sooner

than we think, at that final goodbye

we seem to have anticipated so clearly.

When we arrive at the place

we have understood until now,

only through distance.

When we sit at the bedside

of the loved one as if sitting

by a well where we drink

from the source of all memory;

when we sip together from the grail

of that common memory

and we taste an essence

of love from that memory

that until now we could never fully say,

we are getting ready to be ready

to give the goodbye

we came all along to give.

And if our faith

and the vulnerability

of that faith,

and the wounded

nature of that faith

is felt finally and fully

at the side of that well,

we find ourselves

speaking completely and utterly

the love that we thought had

turned only to memory.

So that after the words

of goodbye are said

everything around us

in the quiet room

and everything spreading

out from the room

becomes like the well itself,

holding the same sacred water,

which is never just still water,

but a hidden flow always arriving,

a never-ending invitation

to drink from the depths,

and perhaps, most of all,

an invitation to somehow rest

in those depths: to rest in that love

that you spoke and they heard,

to wave confusion goodbye,

as you enter

the hallway of presence,

to accompany them

as you always

wanted to accompany them,

and then, to bring everyone

they loved with you,

those you have loved too

and even, those you tried to

and could not,

and then, to make room

inside you, for every single guest.

And above all to be generous now,

as you pass around the grail

of water, saying,

‘This will do.

For now and for eternity.’

David Whyte

in, Still Possible

The sea

 

 The pull is so strong we will not believe

the drawing tide is meant for us,

I mean the gift, the sea,

the place where all the rivers meet.

Easy to forget,

how the great receiving depth

untamed by what we need

needs only what will flow its way.

Easy to feel so far away

and the body so old

it might not even stand the touch.

But what would that be like

feeling the tide rise

out of the numbness inside

toward the place to which we go

washing over our worries of money,

the illusion of being ahead,

the grief of being behind,

our limbs young

rising from such a depth?

What would that be like

even in this century

driving toward work with the others,

moving down the roads

among the thousands swimming upstream,

as if growing toward arrival,

feeling the currents of the great desire,

carrying time toward tomorrow?

Tomorrow seen today, for itself,

the sea where all the rivers meet, unbound,

unbroken for a thousand miles, the surface

of a great silence, the movement of a moment

left completely to itself, to find ourselves adrift,

safe in our unknowing, our very own,

our great tide, our great receiving, our

wordless, fiery, unspoken,

hardly remembered, gift of true longing.

David Whyte