David Whyte: "Sweet Darkness"

When your eyes are tired
the world is tired also.

When your vision has gone
no part of the world can find you.

Time to go into the dark
where the night has eyes
to recognize its own.

There you can be sure
you are not beyond love.

The dark will be your womb
tonight.

The night will give you a horizon
further than you can see.

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.



"Sweet Darkness" by David Whyte, from The House of Belonging (Many Rivers Press, 1996). Text as published on the poet's website.  

Art credit: "Night Fisherman in a Dugout Canoe on the Zambezi River," photographic print by Chris Johns.

David Whyte: "The Opening of Eyes"

                   
                      That day I saw beneath dark clouds
                      the passing light over the water
                      and I heard the voice of the world speak out,
                      I knew then, as I had before
                      life is no passing memory of what has been
                      nor the remaining pages in a great book
                      waiting to be read.

                      It is the opening of eyes long closed.
                      It is the vision of far off things
                      seen for the silence they hold.
                      It is the heart after years
                      of secret conversing
                      speaking out loud in the clear air.

                      It is Moses in the desert
                      fallen to his knees before the lit bush.
                      It is the man throwing away his shoes
                      as if to enter heaven
                      and finding himself astonished,
                      opened at last,
                      fallen in love with solid ground.

"The Opening of Eyes" by David Whyte, from Songs for Coming Home. © Many Rivers Press, 1984.  

Photography credit: Detail from "Man Kisses the Ground," taken in Boston, Massachusetts, on August 30, 2007, by booksin (originally black and white).

David Whyte: "The Winter of Listening"

No one but me by the fire,
my hands burning
red in the palms while
the night wind carries
everything away outside.

All this petty worry
while the great cloak
of the sky grows dark
and intense
round every living thing.

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

What we strive for
in perfection
is not what turns us
into the lit angel
we desire,

what disturbs
and then nourishes
has everything
we need.

What we hate
in ourselves
is what we cannot know
in ourselves but
what is true to the pattern
does not need
to be explained.

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

Even with the summer
so far off
I feel it grown in me
now and ready
to arrive in the world.

All those years
listening to those
who had
nothing to say.

All those years
forgetting
how everything
has its own voice
to make
itself heard.

All those years
forgetting
how easily
you can belong
to everything
simply by listening.

And the slow
difficulty
of remembering
how everything
is born from
an opposite
and miraculous
otherness.

Silence and winter
has led me to that
otherness.

So let this winter
of listening
be enough
for the new life
I must call my own.

"The Winter of Listening" by David Whyte, from The House of Belonging. © Many Rivers Press, 1997.

Photography credit: Detail from "Seeking Warmth: A Kashmiri man warmed his hands over a fire on a street on a cold morning in Srinagar, India, Wednesday," by Fayaz Kabli/Reuters (originally color).

David Whyte: "Sometimes"

Sometimes
if you move carefully
through the forest

breathing
like the ones
in the old stories

who could cross
a shimmering bed of dry leaves
without a sound,

you come
to a place
where the 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.



"Sometimes" by David Whyte, from Everything Is Waiting for You. © Many Rivers Press, 1993.

Image credit: Still from a video clip by an unknown videographer, found at this link (originally color).


 

David Whyte: "Everything Is Waiting for You"

Your great mistake is to act the drama
as if you were alone. As if life
were a progressive and cunning crime
with no witness to the tiny hidden
transgressions. To feel abandoned is to deny
the intimacy of your surroundings. Surely,
even you, at times, have felt the grand array;
the swelling presence, and the chorus, crowding
out your solo voice. You must note
the way the soap dish enables you,
or the window latch grants you freedom.
Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity.
The stairs are your mentor of things
to come, the doors have always been there
to frighten you and invite you,
and the tiny speaker in the phone
is your dream-ladder to divinity.

Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into
the conversation. The kettle is singing
even as it pours you a drink, the cooking pots
have left their arrogant aloofness and
seen the good in you at last. All the birds
and creatures of the world are unutterably
themselves. Everything is waiting for you.

"Everything Is Waiting for You" by David Whyte, from Everything Is Waiting for You. © Many Rivers Press, 2003.

Image credit: "Pots and Pans," oil on canvas, by Hazel Ferrie (originally color).

David Whyte: "What to Remember When Waking"

In that first hardly noticed moment in which you wake,
coming back to this life from the other
more secret, moveable and frighteningly honest world
where everything began,
there is a small opening into the new day
which closes the moment you begin your plans.

What you can plan is too small for you to live.
What you can live wholeheartedly will make plans enough
for the vitality hidden in your sleep.

To be human is to become visible
while carrying what is hidden as a gift to others.
To remember the other world in this world
is to live in your true inheritance.

You are not a troubled guest on this earth,
you are not an accident amidst other accidents,
you were invited from another and greater night
than the one from which you have just emerged.

Now, looking through the slanting light of the morning window
toward the mountain presence of everything that can be
what urgency calls you to your one love?
What shape waits in the seed of you
to grow and spread its branches
against a future sky?

Is it waiting in the fertile sea?
In the trees beyond the house?
In the life you can imagine for yourself?
In the open and lovely white page on the writing desk?

"What to Remember When Waking" by David Whyte, from The House of Belonging. © Many Rivers Press, 1996.

Image credit: "Window View—Golden Mountain Morning," oil painting by L. Skylar Brown.