Consolations - Revised edition: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words

by David Whyte

It may be that time away from a work, an idea of ourselves, or a committed partner is the very essence of appreciation for the other, for the work and for the life of another; to be able to let them alone as we let ourselves alone, to live something that feels like a choice again, to find ourselves alone as a looked-for achievement, not a state to which we have been condemned.

this reflects my longing to be alone and have a room of my own

Everything true to itself has its own secret language and an internal intentionality with a secret, surprising flow, even to the person who supposedly puts it all in motion. Ambition ultimately withers all secrets in its glare before those secrets have had time to come to life from within, and then thwarts the generosity and maturity that ripens the discourse of a lifetime’s dedication to a work.

Ambition left to itself, like the identity of the average billionaire, always becomes tedious, its only object the creation of larger and larger empires of control; but a true vocation calls us out beyond ourselves, breaks our heart in the process and then humbles, simplifies and enlightens us about the hidden, core nature of the work that enticed us in the first place. We find that, all along, we had what we needed from the beginning and that in the end we have returned to its essence, an essence we could not understand until we had experienced the actual heartbreak of the journey.

the deepest form of care, for another, for the world, for the self, for a life, for the body, for a family and for all our ideals, all vulnerable and all, possibly, about to be hurt. Stripped of physical imprisonment and violent reaction, anger points toward the purest form of compassion; the internal living flame of anger always illuminates what we belong to, what we wish to protect and those things for which we

But anger truly felt at its centre is the essential living flame of being fully alive and fully here; it is a quality to be followed to its source, to be prized, to be tended, and an invitation to finding a way to bring that source fully into the world through making the mind clearer and more generous, the heart more compassionate, and the body larger and strong enough to hold it.

Being besieged asks us to begin the day not with a to do list but a not to do list, a moment outside of the time-bound world in which it can be reordered and reprioritised. In this space of undoing and silence we create a foundation from which to re-imagine our day and ourselves. Beginning

Besieged or left alone, we seem to live best at the crossroad between irretrievable aloneness and irretrievable belonging, and even better, as a conversation between the two where no choice is available.

Courage is what love looks like when tested by the simple everyday necessities of being alive.

it can feel like confusion; only slowly do we learn what we really care about, and allow our outer life to be realigned in that gravitational pull. With maturity, that robust vulnerability comes to feel like the only necessary way forward, the only real invitation, and the surest, safest ground from which to step. On the inside we come to know who and what and how we love and what we can do to deepen that love; only from the outside, and only by looking back, does it look like courage.

But perhaps this dark night could be more accurately described as the meeting of two immense storm fronts, the squally vulnerable edge between what overwhelms human beings from the inside and what overpowers them from the outside.

Refusing to face what we are not yet ripe and ready to face can help us to live through the more than enough difficulties of the present.

Denial is a beautiful transitional state every human being inhabits before they are emancipated into the next, larger context and orphaned, often against their will, from their old and very familiar home.

To understand the true nature of our reluctance through observing and then inhabiting our denial is to see directly into the soul’s wish to participate.

Denial is the crossroads between perception and readiness; to deny denial is to invite powers into our lives we have not yet readied ourselves to meet.

Despair is a haven with its own temporary form of strange beauty and self-compassion; it is the invitation we accept when we want to remove ourselves from hurt.

it is the place we go when we do not want to be found in the same way any more.

Despair, strangely, has its own sense of achievement, and despair, even more strangely, needs despair to keep it alive.

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 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 are shaped by our shaping of the world and are shaped again in turn. The way we face the world alters the face we see in the world.

the possibility of fulfilling its promise may depend upon a brave participation, a willingness to hazard ourselves in a difficult world, a certain form of wild generosity with our gifts; a familiarity with our own depth, our own discovered, surprising breadth; and always, a long practised and robust vulnerability equal to what any future may offer.

The attempt to create a life devoid of disappointment is the attempt to avoid the vulnerabilities that make the conversations of life real, moving, and life-like; it is the attempt to avoid our own necessary and merciful heartbreak. To

What we call disappointment may be just the first stage of our emancipation into the next greater pattern of existence.

The measure of our courage is the measure of our willingness to embrace disappointment, to turn towards it rather than away; the understanding that every real conversation of life involves having our hearts broken somewhere along the way and that there is no sincere path we can follow where we will not be fully and immeasurably let down and brought to earth, where what initially looks like a betrayal eventually puts real ground under our feet.

To approach forgiveness is to close in on the nature of the hurt itself, the only remedy being, as we approach its raw centre, to reimagine our relation to it.

In refusing to wait, in extending forgiveness to others now, we begin the long journey of becoming the person who will be large enough, able enough and generous enough to receive, at the very end,

Through the eyes of a friend we especially learn to remain at least a little interesting to others.

the ultimate touchstone is witness, the privilege of having been seen by someone and the equal privilege of being granted the sight of the essence of another, to have walked with them and to have believed in them, and sometimes just to have accompanied them for however brief a span, on a journey impossible to accomplish alone.

human genius lies in the geography of the body and its conversation with the world.

To live out our genius is to live out the conversation between our particular inherited body and the body of the world from which we seem to have been made.

Genius is both a specific gift and a possibility that has not yet occurred; it is not a fixed internal commodity to be exploited and brought to the surface, but a conversation to be followed, deepened, understood and celebrated.

that everything happens both with us and without us, that we are participant and witness all at once.

We sit at the table as part of every other person’s world while making our own world without will or effort; this is what is extraordinary and gifted, this is the essence of gratefulness, seeing to the heart of privilege. Thanksgiving happens when our sense of presence meets all other presences.

To come to ground is to find a home in circumstances, and in the very physical body we inhabit in the midst of those circumstances, and above all to face the truth, no matter how difficult that truth may be; to come to ground is to begin the courageous conversation,

place to step onto, a place on which to stand, and a place from which to step.

What haunts us is always something that seeks its own disappearance: it wants to become fully itself and so depart.

We cease to be haunted when we cease to be afraid of making what has been untouchable real and touchable again: especially our understandings of the past, and especially those we wronged, those we were wronged by, or those we did not help.

When we make a friend of what we previously could not face, what once haunted us now becomes an invisible, parallel ally, a beckoning hand to our future.

Heartbreak is an indication of our sincerity: in a 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 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.

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 even perhaps in the depth of its impact, as well as in its hindsight, to see it as its own reward.

to ask for the right kind of help and to feel that it is no less than our due - that, in effect, we deserve both a visible and an invisible helping hand - may be an engine of transformation itself.

Hiding done properly is the internal faithful promise for a proper future emergence,

What is real is almost always, to begin with, hidden,

What is precious inside us does not care to be known by the mind in ways that diminish its presence.

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.

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.

To become honest is, in effect, to become fully and robustly incarnated into powerlessness.

Joy may be made by hard-won, practised achievement as much as by an unlooked for, passing act of grace arrived out of nowhere; joy, to our consternation, is a measure of our relationship to death and our living with death;

I was here, and you were here, and together we made a world.