David Whyte: Essentials

by David Whyte

Life is fierce and difficult. There is no life we can live without being subject to grief, loss and heartbreak. Half of every conversation is mediated through disappearance. Thus, there is every reason to want to retreat from life, to carry torches that illuminate only our own view, to make enemies of life and of others, to hate what we cannot understand and to keep the world and the people who inhabit it at a distance through prejudicial naming; but therefore, it also follows, that our ability to do the opposite, to meet the other in the world on their own terms, without diminishing them, is one of the necessary signatures of human courage;

falling into a full felt and reciprocated love we face the most difficult, most revealing and most beautiful questions of all: are we large enough and generous enough and present enough; are we deserving enough, and ready enough to hold the joy, the future grief, and the overwhelming sense of privileged blessing that lies in that embrace?

TO BREAK A PROMISE Everywhere in our religious and artistic traditions, we are told how to make and hold to promises, and yet there is almost nothing in our literature to help us in the necessary art of breaking outworn, misguided, or out-of-season bonds that are now obscuring the underlying vow that led us to the commitment in the first place. Breaking promises is something most human beings have to do often, in order to remain true to the deeper underlying current of their lives and, just as often, the lives of those to whom they made the promise: but it is not something we often do well. This poem was written for a letting go that happened in the right kind of way, walking away from a promise that was no longer a promise for the future but an imprisoning bond to an abstract past. This poem could also live under the alternative title of‘To Make a Promise’, a radical human act that calls for the same kind of leaning into the interior ‘white brilliance’ of truth as any promise we may have made. In the making of a necessary promise or in the necessary breaking of a promise, when we do find the core living words that speak for where we need to go or how we need to be, the words themselves have their own power, their own sweet way to take us on; and a need to be left alone to have their own life as a promise themselves, as an invitational mystery, an emblem of our courage, something thereafter to be lived up to and into.

This is beautiful and deep and... never talked about.

To become human is to become visible while carrying what is hidden as a gift to others.

Our human essence lies not in arrival, but in being almost there: we are creatures who are on our way, our journey a series of impending anticipated arrivals. We live by unconsciously measuring the inverse distances of our proximity: an intimacy calibrated by the vulnerability we feel in giving up our sense of separation.

Human beings do not find their essence through fulfillment or eventual arrival but by staying close to the way they like to travel, to the way they hold the conversation between the ground on which they stand and the horizon to which they go. We are in effect, always close; always close to the ultimate secret: that we are more real in our simple wish to find a way than any destination we could reach: the step between not understanding that and understanding that, is as close as we get to happiness.

Despair turns to depression and abstraction when we try to make it stay beyond its appointed season and start to shape our identity around its frozen disappointments. But despair can only stay beyond its appointed time through the forced artificiality of created distance, by abstracting ourselves from bodily feeling, by trapping ourselves in the disappointed mind, by convincing ourselves that the seasons have stopped and can never turn again and, perhaps most simply and importantly, by refusing to let the body breathe by itself, fully and deeply.

We take the first steps out of despair by taking on its full weight and coming fully to ground in our wish not to be here. We let our bodies and we let our world breathe again. In that place, strangely, despair cannot do anything but change into something else, into some other season, as it was meant to do, from the beginning.

Long before I fell in love with the man, I fell in love with the poet for the way his words create an opening for all of us to find our own way into a sense of ground and home in our bodies and experiences, while casting a larger horizon to move into our future all at once.

Good description of Whyte.