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

by David Whyte

forgiveness never arises from the part of us that was actually wounded. The wounded self may be the part of us incapable of forgetting, and perhaps not actually meant to forget, as if, like the foundational dynamics of the physiological immune system, our psychological defences must remember and organise against any future attacks

To forgive is to assume a larger identity than the person who was first hurt, to mature and bring to fruition an identity that can put its arm not only around the afflicted one within but also around the memories seared within us by the original blow, and through a kind of psychological virtuosity extend our understanding to one who first delivered it.

a beautiful question and a way of shaping the mind to a future we want for ourselves;

if understanding is just a matter of time and application then we might as well begin forgiving right at the beginning of any drama rather than put ourselves through the full cycle of festering, incapacitation, reluctant healing and eventual blessing.

An undercurrent of real friendship is a blessing exactly because its elemental form is rediscovered again and again through understanding and mercy. All friendships of any length are based on a continued, mutual forgiveness. Without tolerance and mercy all friendships die.

encourage the best in them, not through critique but through addressing the better part of them, the leading creative edge of their incarnation, thus subtly discouraging what makes them smaller, less generous, less of themselves.

Through the eyes of a friend we especially learn to remain at least a little interesting to others. When we flatten our personalities and lose our curiosity in the life of the world or of another, friendship loses spirit and animation. Boredom is the second great killer of friendship. Through the natural surprises of a relationship held through the passage of years we recognise the greater surprising circles of which we are a part and the faithfulness that leads to a wider sense of revelation, independent of human relationship: to learn to be friends with the earth and the sky, with the horizon and with the seasons, even with the disappearances of winter, and in that faithfulness take the difficult path of becoming a good friend to our own going.

But no matter the medicinal virtues of being a true friend or sustaining a long, close relationship with another, the ultimate touchstone of friendship is not improvement, neither of the other nor of the self: 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.

GENIUS is, by its original definition, something we already possess. Genius is best understood in its foundational and ancient sense, describing the specific underlying quality of a given place, as in the Latin genius loci, the spirit of a place; it describes a form of meeting, of air and land and trees, perhaps a hillside, a cliff edge, a flowing stream or a bridge across a river.

Genius is both a specific gift and a possibility that has not yet occurred;

a conversation to be followed, deepened, understood and celebrated.

Genius is the meetin...

inheritance and horizon, between what has been told, what can be told and what is yet to be told, between our practical abilities and our relationship to ...

Our genius is to understand, and stand beneath the set of stars present at our birth, and from that place to seek the hidden, single star, over the night ...

Every transformation has at its heart the need to ask for the right kind of generosity.

greatest vulnerability, may be the very door through which we must pass in order to open the next horizon of our lives.

Hiding is a way of holding ourselves until we are ready to come into the light. Hiding is one of the brilliant and virtuoso practices of almost every part of the natural world:

Hiding done properly is the internal faithful promise for a proper future emergence, as embryos, as children or even as emerging adults in retreat from the names that have caught us and imprisoned us, often in ways where we have been too easily seen and too easily named.

What is real is almost always, to begin with, hidden, and does not want to be understood by the part of our mind that mistakenly thinks it knows what is happening. What is precious inside us does not care to be known by the mind in ways that diminish its presence. Hiding is an act of freedom from the misunderstanding of others, especially in the enclosing world of oppressive secret government and private entities, attempting to name us, to anticipate us, to leave us with no place to hide and grow in ways unmanaged by a creeping necessity for absolute naming, absolute tracking and absolute control.

Hiding is a bid for independence - from others, from mistaken ideas we have about ourselves, from an oppressive and mistaken wish to keep us completely safe, completely ministered to, and therefore completely managed. Hiding is creative, necessary and beautifully subversive of outside interference and control. Hiding leaves life to itself, to become more of itself. Hiding is the radical independence necessary for our emergence into the light of a proper human future.

The fear of loss, in one form or another, is the motivator behind all conscious and unconscious dishonesties:

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.

go through it and become that beautifully honest spiritual warrior, equal to all circumstances, we would like to become.

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 exactl...

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

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.

the past as we know it is coming to an end.

We are all, almost afraid of nostalgia and we have been told all our lives not to trust it; which in a way, is once again, being told not to trust our own bodies and the many expressions of that body, living through the thresholds of time and tide as it does. This was my attempt to rehabilitate not only the word, but the felt experience. Nostalgia fully felt always flowers into something merciful, forgiveness for a former partner, heart felt gratitude for having had the gift of a good father, forgiveness for a difficult one. The difficulty lies in allowing ourselves to fully experience the absolute physicality of what is emerging. Nostalgia is imminent revelation arriving from deep below our horizon of understanding, from the center of the body, rather than from the heavens above. DW

To rest is to give up on worrying and fretting, and the sense that there is something wrong with the world unless we are there to put it right;

to an inner state of natural exchange.

We are rested when we are a living exchange between what lies inside and what lies outside, when we are an intriguing conversation between the potential that lies in our imagination and the possibilities for making that internal image real in the world;

the physical journey into the body’s uncoerced and unbullied self, as if trying to remember the way or even the destination itself.

In silence, essence speaks to us of essence itself and asks for a kind of unilateral disarmament, our own essential nature slowly emerging as the defended periphery atomises and falls apart.

Out of the quiet emerges the sheer incarnational presence of the world,

To become deeply silent is not to become still, but to become tidal and seasonal, a coming and going that has its own inimitable, essential character, a story not fully told, like the background of the sea, or the rain falling, or the river going on, out of sight, out of our lives.

another identity braver, more generous and more here than the one looking hungrily for the easy, unearned answer.

We withdraw, not to disappear but