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

by David Whyte

BEAUTY is the harvest of presence, the evanescent moment of seeing or hearing on the outside what already lives far inside us;

BEGINNING well or beginning poorly, what is important is simply to begin,

Courage is the measure of our heartfelt participation with life, with another, with a community, a work; a future.

FRIENDSHIP is a mirror to presence and a testament to forgiveness.

All friendships of any length are based on a continued, mutual forgiveness. Without tolerance and mercy all friendships die.

Gratitude is the understanding that many millions of things come together and live together and mesh together and breathe together in order for us to take even one more breath of air,

HEARTBREAK is unpreventable; the natural outcome of caring for people and things over which we have no control, of holding in our affections those who inevitably move beyond our line of sight.

Heartbreak begins the moment we are asked to let go but cannot,

Heartbreak asks us not to look for an alternative path, because there is no alternative path. It is an introduction to what we love and have loved, an inescapable and often beautiful question, something and someone that has been with us all along, asking us to be ready for the ultimate letting go.

HELP is strangely, something we want to do without, as if the very idea disturbs and blurs the boundaries of our individual endeavors, as if we cannot face how much we need in order to go on.

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

To ask for help and to ask for the right kind of help and to feel that it is no less than our due as a live human being; to feel, in effect, that we deserve it, may be the engine of transformation itself.

In the end comes also our beginning, the ancient sense of a door opening to some final unknown, some invisible voice attempting to help us come to terms with our own disappearance, the hand extended to help us over a horizon equally as mysterious as the one we crossed at our birth.

Hiding is a way of holding ourselves until we are ready to come into the light.

NOSTALGIA is the arriving waveform of a dynamic past, newly remembered and about to be re-imagined by a mind and a body at last ready to come to terms with what actually occurred.

PAIN is the doorway to the here and now.

The great measure of human maturation is the increasing understanding that we move through life in the blink of an eye; that we are not long with the privilege of having eyes to see, ears to hear, a voice with which to speak and arms to put round a loved one; that we are simply passing through.

The defining experience at the diamond-hard center of reality is

eternal movement as beautiful and fearful invitation; a beckoning dynamic asking us to move from this to that.

REST is the conversation between what we love to do and how we love to be.

In rest we reestablish the goals that make us more generous, more courageous, more of an invitation, someone we want to remember, and someone others would want to remember too.

Only in maturity do we begin to understand that whatever citadel of thought or identity we have built and proudly displayed to others, whatever monuments to our achievements we attempt to leave behind, none of us know the true perspective with which we will be viewed or the way in which our memory will be enjoyed,

RUN AWAY is what most human beings would like to do a great deal of the time.

Even the most beneficial presence casts a shadow.

SOLACE is the art of asking the beautiful question, of ourselves, of our world or of one another, in fiercely difficult and un-beautiful moments.

Solace is the beautiful, imaginative home we make where disappointment can go to be rehabilitated.

WORK among all its abstracts, is actually intimacy, the place where the self meets the world.

Work is the inside made into the outside.