The Poet David Whyte

It doesn't interest me if there is one God or many gods.
I want to know if you belong or feel abandoned.
If you know despair or can see it in others.
I want to know if you are prepared to live in the world
with its harsh need to change you.
If you can look back with firm eyes
saying "this is where I stand."

I want to know if you know how to melt
into that fierce heat of living
falling toward the center of your longing.
I want to know if you are willing to live,
day by day,
with the consequence of love
and the bitter unwanted passion of sure defeat.
I have been told, in that fierce embrace,
even the gods speak of God.
.............from "Fire in the Earth", by David Whyte

Another syncronicity that occured in our Kripalu Workshop was that one of the participants placed an audio cd by contemporary poet DAVID WHYTE on the altar we made.

I had been reading "The Winter of Listening" on the plane that brought me to Massachusetts. I feel moved to share here a few of his poems, because they've been with me over coffee this morning. Yes, especially now, as I sit looking out across the Berkshires, the trees bare still but the sun fragile and brilliant, the vitality of early spring a deep, deep hum within the earth, a rythem pulsing through my feet, an attunement I long to continue for more than this one last day.

David Whyte's poetry has always had a way of bringing me home.

From "The winter of Listening"

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.

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.

. . . . . . . . . .

by David Whyte