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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
David Whyte
a beautiful and difficult sense of being solitary is always the ground from which we step into a contemplative intimacy with the unknown,
Alone, we live in our bodies as a question rather
than a statement.
The permeability of being alone asks us to reimagine ourselves, to become impatient with ourselves, to tire of the same old story and then slowly, hour by hour, to start to tell the story in a different way, as other parallel ears, ones we were previous...
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aloneness asks us to make a frien...
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inhabit that silence in our own particular way, to find our very own way into our own particular, and eve...
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To inhabit silence in our aloneness is to stop telling th...
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back at us in the silent mirror.
the slow knitting together of an inner life, now
exposed to air and light.
the radical step is to let ourselves alone, to cease the berating voice that is constantly trying to interpret and force the story from too small and too complicated a perspective.
To want to be alone is to refuse a certain kind of conversational hospitality and to turn to another door, and another kind of welcome, not necessarily defined by human vocabulary.
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.
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 heartbre...
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A life’s work is not a series of stepping-stones, onto which we calmly place our feet, but more like an ocean crossing where there is no path, only a heading, a direction, in conversation with the elements. Looking back, we see the wake we have left as only a brief glimmering trace on the waters.
The authentic watermark running through the background of a life’s work is an arrival at generosity and, as a mark of that generosity, delight in the hopes of the young:
the passing on of a sense of sheer privilege, of having found a road, a way to follow, and then having been allowed to walk it, often with others, with all its difficulties and minor triumphs; the underlying primary gift of having been both a witness to and a full
participant in the conversation.
anger always illuminates what we belong to, what we wish to protect and those things for which we are willing to hazard and even imperil ourselves.
violent outer response to our own inner powerlessness, a powerlessness connected to such a profound sense of rawness and care that it can find no proper outer body or identity or voice, or way of life to hold it.
the unwillingness to live the full measure of our fears or of our not knowing, in the face of our love for a wife, in the depth of our caring for a son, in our wanting the best, in the face of simply being alive and loving those with whom we live.
Anger turns to violence and violent speech when the mind refuses to countenance the vulnerability of the body in its love for all these outer things - we are often abused or have been abused by those who love us but have no vehicle to carry
its understanding,
vulnerability. In their helplessness they turn their violence on the very people who are the outer representation of this inner lack of control.
anger truly felt at its centre is the essential living flame of being
fully alive and fu...
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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 t...
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harvest of presence,
beauty is the conversation between what we think is happening outside in the world and what is just about to occur far inside us.
Beauty is an achieved state of both deep attention and self-forgetting:
that fearful frontier between what we think makes us; and what we think makes the world.
inner and an outer complexion living in one face.
in the meeting of time with the timeless;
Beauty is the harvest of presence.
Courage is the measure of our heartfelt participation with life, with another, with a community, a work; a future. To be courageous is not necessarily to go anywhere or do anything, except to make conscious those things we already feel deeply and then to live through the unending vulnerabilities of those consequences.
To be courageous is
to seat our feelings deeply in the body an...
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To be courageous is to stay close to the way we are made.
live to the point of tears,
as an invitation to the deep privilege of belonging, and the way belonging affects us, shapes us and breaks our heart at a fundamental level.
Courage is what love looks like when tested by the simple everyday necessities of being alive.
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.
Denial is an ever-present and even splendid thing when seen in the light of its merciful and elemental powers to cradle and hold an identity until it is ready to move on.
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.
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.
It is still our destiny, our life, but the sense of satisfaction involved and 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. Our destiny is fated not only by great powers beyond our beckoning horizon but by the very way we shape and hold the everyday conversations of a familiar life.
It may be that the part of us that was struck and hurt can never forgive, that,
