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

by David Whyte

In rest we re-establish 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.

A robust response always entertains the possibility of humiliation; it is also a kind of faith, a sense that we will somehow survive the impact of a vigorous meeting, though not perhaps in the manner to which we are accustomed.

The less contact we have with anything other than our own body, our own rhythm or the way we have arranged our life, the more afraid we can become of the frontier where actual noise, meetings and changes occur.

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.

To understand the part of us that wants nothing to do with the full necessities of work, of relationships, of doing what is required, is to learn humility, to cultivate self-compassion, and to sharpen that sense of humour essential to a merciful perspective of both a self and another.

Shadow is shaped by presence; presence comes a priori to our flaws and absences.

To live with our shadow is to understand how human beings live at a frontier between light and dark, and to approach the central difficulty: that there is no possibility of a lighted perfection in this life; that the attempt to create it is often the attempt to be held unaccountable, to be the exception, to be the one who does not have to be present or participate, and therefore does not have to hurt or get hurt.

SHYNESS is the hallway of presence, the necessary doorway to new and deeper desires, the first necessary step in the maturation of an unexpected life, and arises from the sudden, often unwanted and difficult grounding that undergirds our experience of awe.

Shyness is the first necessary crossroads on the path of becoming.

Without shyness we cannot shape an identity ripe for revelation.

Solace is what we must look for when the mind cannot bear the pain, the loss or the suffering that eventually touches every life and every endeavour; when longing does not come to fruition in a form we can recognise; when people we know and love disappear; when hope must take a different form than the one we have shaped for it.

Solace is the spacious, imaginative home we make where disappointment goes to be welcomed and rehabilitated.

Solace is found in allowing the body’s innate foundational wisdom to come to the fore, the part of us that already knows it is mortal and must take its leave like everything else, and leading us, when the mind cannot bear what it is seeing or hearing, to the birdsong in the tree above our heads, even as we are being told of a death, each note an essence of morning and of mourning, of the current of a life moving on, but somehow also, and most beautifully, carrying, bearing and even celebrating the life we have just lost – a life we could not see or appreciate until it was taken from us.

Standing in loss but not overwhelmed by it, we become useful and generous and compassionate and even more amusing companions for others.

Firstly, how will you bear the inevitable loss that will accompany you? And how will you endure its memory through the years? And above all, how will you shape a life equal to and as beautiful and as astonishing as a world that can birth you, bring you into the light, and then, just as you are beginning to understand it, take you away?

What other human being could ever love us as we need to be loved? And whom could we know so well and so intimately through all the twists and turns of a given life that we could show them exactly the continuous and appropriate form of affection they need?

The great discipline seems to be to give up wanting to control the manner in which we are requited, and to forgo the natural disappointment that flows from expecting an exact and measured reciprocation, from a partner, from a child, from our hopes for a loving God.

We withdraw, not to disappear but to find another ground from which to see; a solid ground from which to step, and from which to speak again, in a different way: a clear, rested, embodied voice, our life as a suddenly emphatic statement, one we can recognise as our own, and one from which, now, we have absolutely lost the wish to withdraw.