As always his prose and poetry rise up and envelope with presence and meaning. He speaks to our need for solitude which truly resonates. I just attended a wonderful webinar on wilderness witnessing and retreat and all the many ways we can experience the wild within and without in our spiritual practice.
Here’s David Whyte:
| One of the elemental dynamics of self-compassion is to understand how much we need to be left to ourselves, and how much, in a way, we need to leave ourselves alone. Aloneness begins with puzzlement at our own reflection, transits through awkwardness and even ugliness at what we see, and culminates, one appointed hour or day, in a beautiful, unlooked-for surprise, at the new complexion beginning to form, the slow knitting together of an inner life, now exposed to air and light. -David Whyte |
| The Well But the miracle had come simply from allowing yourself to know that this time you had found it, that some stranger appearing from far inside you, had decided not to walk past it anymore; the miracle had come in the kneeling to drink and the prayer you said, and the first tears you shed and the memories you held and the realization that in this silence you no longer had to keep your eyes and ears averted from the place that could save you, and that you had the strength at last to let go of that thirsty, unhappy, dust laden pilgrim-self that brought you here, walking with her bent back, her bowed head and her careful explanations. No, the miracle had already happened before you stood up, shook off the dust and walked along the road beyond the well, out of the desert and on, toward the mountain, as if home again, as if you deserved everything you had loved all along, as if just remembering the taste of that clear cool spring could lift up your face to the morning light and set you free. -David Whyte Revised from ‘The Well’ inPilgrim |