David Whyte: Essentials

by David Whyte

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.