David Whyte: Essentials

by David Whyte

The act of writing anything worthwhile always takes place at that strange and sometimes disturbing crossroads where aloneness and intimacy meet. The solitariness of the writer, sometimes at a desk, sometimes while writing in a notebook on a skittering knee while travelling, always, if followed rightly, culminates in a radical form of undoing that leads to the distinctions between aloneness and togetherness breaking down altogether. This break of the boundary between what we think is a self and what we think is other than our self is where the rich vein of beauty and insight become a reward in and of itself, and where the words suddenly seem to belong to everyone.

respect and support always being the necessary bedrock of any good marriage or any real friendship.

Start Close In Start close in, don’t take the second step or the third, start with the first thing close in, the step you don’t want to take. Start with the ground you know, the pale ground beneath your feet, your own way to begin the conversation. Start with your own question, give up on other people’s questions, don’t let them smother something simple. To hear another’s voice, follow your own voice, wait until that voice becomes an intimate private ear that can really listen to another. Start right now take a small step you can call your own don’t follow someone else’s heroics, be humble and focused, start close in, don’t mistake that other for your own. Start close in, don’t take the second step or the third, start with the first thing close in, the step you don’t want to take.

the difficult act we all experience, of trying to make a home in the world again when everything has been taken away; the necessity of stepping bravely again, into what looks now like a dark wood, when the outer world as we know it has disappeared, when the world has to be met and in some ways made again from no outer ground but from the very center of our being. The temptation is to take the second or third step, not the first, to ignore the invitation into the center of our own body, into our grief, to attempt to finesse the grief and the absolutely necessary understanding at the core of the pattern, to forgo the radical and almost miraculous simplification into which we are being invited. Start close in.

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; and one we are being asked to write, above all our flaws and difficulties, across the heavens of this, our present time. The essence in other words of The Journey.

You must learn one thing. The world was made to be free in. Give up all the other worlds except the one to which you belong. Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet confinement of your aloneness to learn anything or anyone that does not bring you alive is too small for you.

we ourselves have often helped to make everything and everyone around us far too small, by our lack of faith in the midst of a necessary not knowing, by all the ways we are not holding the conversation.

Sometimes Sometimes if you move carefully through the forest, breathing like the ones in the old stories, who could cross a shimmering bed of leaves without a sound, you come to a place whose only task is to trouble you with tiny but frightening requests, conceived out of nowhere but in this place beginning to lead everywhere. Requests to stop what you are doing right now, and to stop what you are becoming while you do it, questions that can make or unmake a life, questions that have patiently waited for you, questions that have no right to go away.

What is precious inside us does not care to be known by the mind in ways that diminish its presence.

what disturbs and then nourishes has everything we need.

what is true to the pattern does not need to be explained.

Inside everyone is a great shout of joy waiting to be born.

everything has its own voice to make itself heard.

how easily you can belong to everything simply by listening.

everything is born from an opposite and miraculous otherness.

Silence and winter have led me to that otherness.

an ancient intuitive understanding of winter as a time to leave things alone, to let things remain hidden, even to themselves. A time when to name anything would be to give it the wrong name, most especially refusing to name ourselves, a radical sense of letting ourselves alone, without even the most subtle, internal self-bullying or coercion. It is the intimate experience in sitting alone by afire, in silence and in reverie, with both a simplification and a growing clairvoyance of what is just beginning to be made known. A Winter of Listening.

Santiago The road seen, then not seen, the hillside hiding then revealing the way you should take, the road dropping away from you as if leaving you to walk on thin air, then catching you, holding you up, when you thought you would fall, and the way forward always in the end the way that you followed, the way that carried you into your future, that brought you to this place, no matter that it sometimes took your promise from you, no matter that it had to break your heart along the way: the sense of having walked from far inside yourself out into the revelation, to have risked yourself for something that seemed to stand both inside you and far beyond you, that called you back in the end to the only road you could follow, walking as you did, in your rags of love and speaking in the voice that by night became a prayer for safe arrival, so that one day you realized that what you wanted had already happened, and long ago and in the dwelling place in which you had lived in before you began, and that every step along the way, you had carried the heart and the mind and the promise that first set you off and then drew you on and that, you were more marvelous in your simple wish to find a way than the gilded roofs of any destination you could reach: as if, all along, you had thought the end point might be a city with golden domes, and cheering crowds, and turning the corner at what you thought was the end of the road, you found just a simple reflection, and a clear revelation beneat...

May you see what is hidden in you as a place of hospitality and shadowed shelter, may what is hidden in you become your gift to give,