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

by David Whyte

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.

Ambition

A vocation always includes the specific, heartrending way we will fail at our attempt to live fully. A true vocation always metamorphoses both ambition and failure into compassion and understanding for others.

as if breathing from the atmosphere of possibility itself. 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.

What we have named as anger on the surface is the 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.