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"Be impatient with easy explanations and teach that part of the mind that wants to know everything." ~David Whyte
"DESPAIR takes us in when we have nowhere else to go; when we feel the heart cannot break anymore, when our world or our loved ones disappear, when we feel we cannot be loved or do not deserve to be loved, when our God disappoints, or when our body is carrying profound pain in a way that does not seem to go away. Despair is a haven with its own temporary form of beauty; of self compassion, it is the invitation we accept when we want to remove ourselves from hurt." ~David Whyte
"Every person come to a place, at one time or another in their maturation, of complete loss or deadness, a stark and frightening absence of creativity or even enthusiasm for creativity, where life seems to have retreated from us like a tide." ~David Whyte (FB on Midlife)
"Every real relationship has as its heart and soul a real, beautiful and mutually experienced invitation." ~David Whyte (Invitation and Relationship: November Thoughts)
"Forgiveness is a skill, a way of preserving clarity, sanity and generosity in an individual life, a beautiful question and a way of shaping the mind to a future we want for ourselves; an admittance that if forgiveness comes through understanding, and if understanding is just a matter of time and application then we might as well begin forgiving right at the beginning of any drama, rather than put ourselves through the full cycle of festering, incapacitation, reluctant healing and eventual blessing." ~David Whyte
"FRIENDSHIP is a mirror to presence and a testament to forgiveness. Friendship not only helps us to see ourselves through another’s eyes, but can be sustained over the years only with someone who has repeatedly forgiven us for our trespasses as we must find it in ourselves to forgive them in turn. A friend knows our difficulties and shadows and remains in sight, a companion to our vulnerabilities more than our triumphs, when we are under the strange illusion we do not need them. An undercurrent of real friendship is a blessing exactly because its elemental form is rediscovered again and again through understanding and mercy. All friendships of any length are based on a continued, mutual forgiveness. Without tolerance and mercy all friendships die." ~David Whyte
"Honesty is reached through the doorway of grief and loss." ~David Whyte
"I loved the wind
on the moors
that carried the rain
and that carried the ashes
of the dead,
like a spring sowing
of memory,
stored through all
the winters past...
~David Whyte
'YORKSHIRE'
From RIVER FLOW: New and Selected Poems
© David Whyte and Many Rivers Press
"Memory is a pulse passing through all created life, a wave form, and then continually becoming other thens, all the while creating a continual but almost untouchable now." ~David Whyte, Essay, "Memory"
"Recall the way mere mortals are overwhelmed by circumstance, how great reputations dissolve with infirmity and how you, in particular, stand a hairsbreadth from losing everyone you hold dear." ~David Whyte, Mameen (From Tobar Phadraic - River Flow Poetry
"So let this winter
of listening
be enough
for the new life
I must call my own."
~David Whyte
excerpt from "Winter of Listening"
"Sometimes everything has to be enscribed across the heavens so you can find
The one line already written inside you." ~David Whyte, The Journey (River Flow)
"Sometimes the best thing to do is to hold a kind of silent vigil beside the part of us that is going through the depths of a difficult transformation. When the outer story that the ego tells merges with the one the inner self has come to, this becomes "the marriage of true minds." The ego seems to disappear, but actually it has simply assumed its rightful place in the hierarchy of priorities; it has become a good servant to the soul's desires." ~David Whyte from Dreamwork with Toko-pa
"The doorway to a radical, numinous, simplicity seems to be reached by the long and difficult path of generosity." ~David Whyte (FB, Thoughts from Avignon, 2013)
"The invisible conversation you held while you were alive can still be heard in every shadowed wall, in the birdsong of morning, and in the last light of evening, the final rays above the river drawing the shape you make in the air by your absence." ~David Whyte, Elegy for a Lost Friend (Thoughts if Avignon) @June 2013
"The severest test of work today, is not of our strategies, but of our imaginations and identities." ~David Whyte, From Crossing the Unknown Sea
"They realize at once that all along they have been an invitation to everything and every kind of trouble and that life happens by to those who inhabit silence." ~David Whyte (from his poem: IT HAPPENS TO THOSE WHO LIVE ALONE)
“To forgive is to assume a larger identity than the person who was first hurt.” ~David Whyte, poet and philosopher
“To have a firm persuasion, to set out boldly in our work, is to make a pilgrimage of our labors, to understand that the consummation of work lies not only in what we have done, but who we have become while accomplishing the task…. To view work as a pilgrimage is to put our hearts’ desires to hazard, because by merely setting out, we have told ourselves that there is something bigger and better, or even smaller and better — above all, something more life giving— that awaits us in our work, and we are going to seek it.” ~David Whyte, Author of Crossing the Unknown Sea
"To want to run away is an essence of being human, it transforms any staying through the transfigurations of choice. To think about fleeing from circumstances, from a marriage, a relationship; from a work is part of the conversation itself and helps us understand the true distilled nature of our own reluctance. We are perhaps most fully incarnated as humans strangely, when part of us does not want to be here, or does not know how to be here. Presence is only fully understood and realized through fully understanding our reluctance to show up." ~David Whyte on RUN AWAY
"Touch is what we desire in one form or another, even if we find it through being alone, through the agency of silence or through the felt need to walk at a distance: the meeting with something or someone other than ourselves, the light brush of grass on the skin, the ruffling breeze, the actual touch of another’s hand; even the gentle first touch of an understanding which until now, we were formally afraid to hold." ~David Whyte (Touch in Consolations) @2015
“You must learn one thing. The world was made to be free in. Give up all the other worlds Except the one in which you belong.” ~David Whyte
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PERSPECTIVES
"ALONE is a word that stands by itself, carrying the austere, solitary beauty of its own meaning even as it is spoken to another. It is a word that can be felt at the same time as an invitation to depth and as an imminent threat, as in ‘all alone’, with its returned echo of abandonment. ‘Alone’ is a word that rings with a strange finality, especially when contained in that haunting aggregate, ‘left all alone’, as if the state once experienced begins to define and engender its own inescapable world. The first step in spending time alone is to admit how afraid of it we are.
Being alone is a difficult discipline: a beautiful and difficult sense of being solitary is always the ground from which we step into a contemplative intimacy with the unknown, but the first portal of aloneness is often experienced as a gateway to alienation, grief and abandonment. To find our selves alone or to be left alone is an ever present, fearful and abiding human potentiality of which we are often unconsciously, and deeply afraid.
To be alone for any length of time is to shed an outer skin. The body is inhabited in a different way when we are alone than when we are with others. Alone, we live in our bodies as a question rather than a statement." ~David Whyte
Nostalgia is not indulgence. Nostalgia tells us we are in the presence of imminent revelation, about to break through the present structures held together by the way we have remembered: something we thought we understood but that we are now about to fully understand, something already lived but not fully lived, issuing not from our future but from something already experienced, something that was important, but something to which we did not grant importance enough, something now wanting to be lived again, at the depth to which it first invited us but which we originally refused. Nostalgia is not an immersion in the past, nostalgia is the first annunciation that the past as we knew it is coming to an end." ~©2014 David Whyte
Excerpted from ‘NOSTALGIA’ From the upcoming book of essays CONSOLATIONS: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words (from FB)
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