David Whyte: Essentials

by David Whyte

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...