David Whyte and "Belonging"

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

 

I increasingly crave refuge from the harshness and distracting speed, speed, speed of modern life, and perhaps most of all, the awful numbing desensitizing of it all, the lack of focus or passion in the midst of nano-second, scroll down life .  

I found my way back to the familiar poetry of visionary David Whyte.  Although the second poem is a winter poem, and it is almost Mabon, the Harvest and advent of beautiful fall, still, I wanted to  absorb it again. 

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

Why We Need the Dark - Solstice Reflections

 

"We’ve rolled back the night so far that soon we will come full circle and reach the dawn of the following day. And where will that leave us? In a world with no God and no wolf either — only unrelenting commerce and consumption, information and media ... and light. We need a rest from ourselves that only a night like the winter solstice can give us."

A post from 2017 I felt like revisiting - as always, my thoughts, particularly at this time of year, turn to "Endarkenment" as the Balance and partner of "Enlightenment".  :

I remember a winter night many years ago, when I lived in the country in upstate N.Y..   I shared a house with a second story living room that had a big picture window,  A  mid-winter snowstorm had left us stranded in a shimmering blanket of snow.  One could look out on that field of white, illuminated by the dark sky, the moon, and an occasional star,  into a vast,  dark silence.   For a while the lights went out, but we had no shortage of candles, and somehow that makes the memory even sweeter for me.  The intensity of the dark and the silence the snow that long ago December was not frightening, but intimate,  a landscape for sleep, for the incubation of dreams, a place to heal from the frenzy of achievement and obligation, a darkness ripe with dormant life.  A place where we could lie together in the warmth of our bed, becoming aware of  the occasional sound of snowfall, or an animal moving outside.  

I remember recently seeing a time lapse film of cities - vast networks of light, sky scrapers and traffic rushing along freeways like blood coursing along arteries, and I was struck by how much it looked like some kind of organism frenetically pulsing and extruding itself and consuming everything around it.  The truth is, it had a terrible beauty - the shimmering, glittering urban  triumph of humanity over nature, over the darkness.  Or is it truly "triumph"?  How is it possible we have so forgotten that we are not the conquerors of nature, but part of nature?  Have we failed to see, in our blinding pursuit of speed and of "illumination" that we are also animals, participating in the cycles and seasons of the life of Gaia, needing rest, incubation, renewal, and the sweet silence of the dark.

Newgrange at the Winter Solstice

In the years since, I have so often thought of those winter nights. 

I  take the liberty of reprinting here a wonderful article by Clark Strand, whose book is well worth reading.  He has had such nights too, of that I'm sure. 

Bring On the Dark:  Why We Need the Winter Solstice

By CLARK STRAND
December 19, 2014

WOODSTOCK, N.Y. — WHEN the people of this small mountain town got their first dose of electrical lighting in late 1924, they were appalled. “Old people swore that reading or living by so fierce a light was impossible,” wrote the local historian Alf Evers. That much light invited comparisons. It was an advertisement for the new, the rich and the beautiful — a verdict against the old, the ordinary and the poor. As Christmas approached, a protest was staged on the village green to decry the evils of modern light.

Woodstock has always been a small place with a big mouth where cultural issues are concerned. But in this case the protest didn’t amount to much. Here as elsewhere in early 20th-century America, the reluctance to embrace brighter nights was a brief and halfhearted affair.

Tomorrow is the winter solstice, the longest night of the year. But few of us will turn off the lights long enough to notice. There’s no getting away from the light. There are fluorescent lights and halogen lights, stadium lights, streetlights, stoplights, headlights and billboard lights. There are night lights to stand sentinel in hallways, and the lit screens of cellphones to feed our addiction to information, even in the middle of the night. No wonder we have trouble sleeping. The lights are always on.

In the modern world, petroleum may drive our engines but our consciousness is driven by light. And what it drives us to is excess, in every imaginable form.

Beginning in the late 19th century, the availability of cheap, effective lighting extended the range of waking human consciousness, effectively adding more hours onto the day — for work, for entertainment, for discovery, for consumption; for every activity except sleep, that nightly act of renunciation. Darkness was the only power that has ever put the human agenda on hold.

In centuries past, the hours of darkness were a time when no productive work could be done. Which is to say, at night the human impulse to remake the world in our own image — so that it served us, so that we could almost believe the world and its resources existed for us alone — was suspended. The night was the natural corrective to that most persistent of all illusions: that human progress is the reason for the world.

Advances in science, industry, medicine and nearly every other area of human enterprise resulted from the influx of light. The only casualty was darkness, a thing of seemingly little value. But that was only because we had forgotten what darkness was for. In times past people took to their beds at nightfall, but not merely to sleep. They touched one another, told stories and, with so much night to work with, woke in the middle of it to a darkness so luxurious it teased visions from the mind and divine visitations that helped to guide their course through life. Now that deeper darkness has turned against us. The hour of the wolf we call it — that predatory insomnia that makes billions for big pharma. It was once the hour of God.

There is, of course, no need to fear the dark, much less prevail over it. Not that we could. Look up in the sky on a starry night, if you can still find one, and you will see that there is a lot of darkness in the universe. There is so much of it, in fact, that it simply has to be the foundation of all that is. The stars are an anomaly in the face of it, the planets an accident. Is it evil or indifferent? I don’t think so. Our lives begin in the womb and end in the tomb. It’s dark on either side.

We’ve rolled back the night so far that soon we will come full circle and reach the dawn of the following day. And where will that leave us? In a world with no God and no wolf either — only unrelenting commerce and consumption, information and media ... and light. We need a rest from ourselves that only a night like the winter solstice can give us. And the earth, too, needs that rest. The only thing I can hope for is that, if we won’t come to our senses and search for the darkness, on nights like these, the darkness will come looking for us.

Storms and Memoir

                 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.

               David Whyte 

In this strange time of isolation, as the silent storm of the Pandemic Covid19 fell  like a blanket over Tucson,   I was  determined to renew my writing, and work on this Blog as a true journal.  However, I find that I have writer's block! What to write about that is "personal"...........and do I dare to be "personal", or is "personal" really even relevant, as storms break over the global creations of humanity?  

Still, I find that the quietude of this isolation  has found me  collecting memories, excerpts that  arise as dog-earred touchstones, like shuffling through the random pages of a book, in this case,  the book of my life.  I by no means fail to understand the suffering of so many as the Covid19 pandemic continues.  I've been on  a healing journey since the beginning of the year, and although I am much better than I was now,  my energy is still very much compromised, forcing me to move slowly, do little.  Like the empty streets of Tucson, I am "paused".  

Someone once said I should write memoirs.........well, I suppose I'm of an age when people do that, although I am taken aback by the vanity of such an idea.   And yet........I have seen some beauty  in my time, and that collateral beauty keeps  coming back, like a fragrance or a flavor.  I suppose I've repeated myself a few times............if caught at it, please forgive me. 

I've been thinking of friends I've lost.   Among them Felicia, who I did a large painting of as the "High Priestess" in the Tarot  when we were young students at Berkeley.  I worked so hard on that painting.........and now, like all my early work, I have no idea what happened to it.  It has taken me so  many years to learn to value my work, my time, and in general myself...........I look back at all of that early work, most of which I threw away, with regret, because much of it was beautiful.  

Felicia and I lost touch when I moved away in 1976.  And then, amazingly, we made contact again in 2007, when I happened to publish some of the Poems Felicia had left me all those years ago on my website.   When Felicia and I re-connected she was living in Washington D.C., and she had just been diagnosed with breast cancer.  Shortly  after that she went to Germany to undergo an experimental treatment that brought the cancer into remission, for a while. 

In 2008 I went to Puerto Rico, where Felicia was staying with a friend, for a short but very memorable visit  after she had completed her treatment.  I saw her for the last time in 2009 when I was Resident Artist at Wesley in Washington, D.C.

Above is a picture I took of Felicia taking a nap in my hotel room in Puerto Rico.   Felicia passed through  doors that I can't open more than ten years ago.  I miss her.  

Puerto Rico:  I remember the heavy, tropical  atmosphere, as I happened to be there in the season of storms.  Intensities……. that’s what the tropics are, life at its most vibrant, virulent, creative, predatory, colorful………it is impossible to be in the midst of that potency of life and not become intoxicated with it. Intoxicated or terrified, or both. 

I had a room with a balcony at the top of a three story  hotel called the Lazy Parrot, in Rincon. I’m sure it’s a hopping place in its season, with  two bars below and tiers of balconies looking out over the green hills that wind down to the ocean, famous  for surfing and snorkeling. However,   I  had arrived at hurricane  season, and found myself pretty much alone in the hotel.  I felt a bit like a character from Stephen King’s “The Shining”, with a whole hotel to myself at night, not even an attendant in sight, empty bars ringing with the ghosts of bands and booze and laughter and sex.  Below me an empty blue pool, palm fronds and  chairs tied to the wall, and the wet, heavy tropical air,  whispering over wicker tables. 

I do not think I shall ever forget standing on the balcony, the sounds of the frogs seeming very loud, hearing a woman call for her dog in Spanish “Limon, Limon!”, and watching the sudden illumination of lightning as it revealed an advancing mass of vast clouds, rolling in from the  ocean. I could not but be awed by the truth of that moment, our lives, our plans, our hopes  existing in the brief moments between  storms. 

As the storm progressed, the lights went out.  There were no candles, or any attendants to ask about candles.  So, I sat in the state of Storm, with nothing to do but witness.

Fortunately for me, the storm did not make landfall at the hotel,  I did not have to find a basement to hide in, or hear the sounds of crashing glass and trees, and the morning brought breaking dawn as the tropical storm veered off in a different direction.    But I'll never forget that night of vigil, and the Collateral Beauty. 

I know that sometimes
your body is hard like a stone
on a path that storms break over,
embedded deeply
into that something that you think is you,
and you will not move
while the voice all around
tears the air
and fills the sky with jagged light.

But sometimes unawares
those sounds seem to descend
as if kneeling down into you
and you listen strangely caught
as the terrible voice moving closer
halts,
and in the silence
now arriving
whispers

Get up, I depend
on you utterly.
Everything you need
you had
the moment before
you were born.



~ David Whyte ~

Where Many Rivers Meet

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.

......David Whyte*

https://youtu.be/MgQf5tx1hi4

*https://www.davidwhyte.com/river-flow-new-and-selected-poems

River Flow: New & Selected Poems

Whether writing of his Yorkshire childhood, trekking in the Himalayas, youthful partings in the mountains of South America, fireside talks on a Welsh far with a friend with a passion for Blake or the Ireland of his mother's heart. David Whyte's poems have their feet planted firmly in the natural world, simultaneously inviting us to join him on the path and admonishing us to get down on our hands and knees in the thicket and find our own way.  RIVER FLOW contains over one hundred poems selected from five previously published works, together with 23 new poems, including a tribute to an Ethiopian woman navigating her first escalator, and a cycle of Irish poems that convey his deep love of the land and lifelong appreciation for its wisdom. 

David Whyte on visible and invisible support

Thursday, December 8, 2016 - 4:28 pm

THE POETRY RADIO PROJECT

“Working Together”

We shape our self
 to fit this world

and by the world
 are shaped again.

The visible
 and the invisible

working together
 in common cause,

to produce
 the miraculous.

I am thinking of the way
 the intangible air

traveled at speed
 round a shaped wing

easily
 holds our weight.

So may we, in this life
 trust

to those elements
 we have yet to see

or imagine,
 and look for the true

shape of our own self,
 by forming it well

to the great
 intangibles about us.

---

from David Whyte’s collection of poetry, River Flow: New and Selected Poems. For more poetry, visit On Being's  Poetry Radio Project.

To hear "Everything is Waiting for You" as well: 

 https://soundcloud.com/onbeing/david-whyte-everything-is-waiting-for-you

The Winter Solstice

Serpent Mound illuminated through the efforts of the Friends of Serpent Mound

This has been a strange year, a year in which chaos and shadow and tragedy has been rising, as well as extraordinary bravery and new clarity.  A year of tremendous contrasts, and I think many of us are frightened now, and unsure of what to do.  Lately I have been feeling the need to make circles, to bring forth the "light" wherever it can be found, including inside me, that is inclusive, that reminds me of how sacred the world is, and how we, as human beings among so many incredible beings on our Mother Earth are all a part of each other.  And the Solstice is a Circle as well.

When language was young, when even the gods and goddesses had not yet entirely taken human form but still ran with the deer in the forest, or flew with the wings of crows, or were glimpsed the depths of a numinous pool, when World was still a conversation, and poems were spoken by both bards and by trees,  and our unimaginable ancestors danced and kept watch  through the long, cold, dark night....... even then, long before the writing of words, but perhaps not before the telling of tales,  this was a (w)holy day. 

The Sun was returning to the dark and sleeping world, bringing life-giving light and warmth.

Before ever there were Christmas lights, or candles, or even torches burning olive oil, fires were lit to welcome the Shining One returning from the depths of the underworld.  Stones aligned with the  Sun's journey made a pathway, and food and drink and gifts were given to the young god, just born,  to give him  strength for the new year and his long bright journey across the skylands. 

Perhaps  they  danced through the long cold night, and when they lit bonfires, they did so reverently and with love, knowing that they were  helping him on his way, keeping vigil for him.  Before ever he was called the Christ, or Osiris, or Lugh, he had other names, names lost to history that still whisper and sound sometimes sing again among the stones and circles of another time.   

 Planet Earth turns her face toward the glory of her star again,  She circles round, just as we do,  and we turn with her, every  creature held  within her fragile, azure skin.   May the Light bless you, and Shine in your life.

Winter Solstice, Willits Community (2012) Photo courtesy JJ Idarius & Ann Waters

  

  Happy Solstice!

I pledge allegiance

to the soil of Turtle Island,

and to the beings

who thereon dwell

one ecosystem in diversity

under the sun

With joyful

interpenetration for all.

Gary Snyder

Winter Solstice, Willits Community (2012) Photo courtesy JJ Idarius & Ann Waters

"To go in the dark with a light
is to know the light. 

To know the dark, go dark.
 Go without sight, and find
 that the dark, too, blooms and sings,
 and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings."

Wendell Berry

Winter Solstice inside Newgrange

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.

David Whyte

Photo by NASA

"Everything is Waiting for You": David Whyte & the Conversational World

        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.

  -- David Whyte**
      from Everything is Waiting for You 
     ©2003 Many Rivers Press

I was listening to a wonderful interview on On Being with Krista Tippet with the poet/philosopher David Whyte - the title of the interview immediately struck me:  "the conversational nature of reality".  So many times I have myself thought of "the great Conversation" he speaks of.  World is always speaking, speaking to us........
and Whyte points out that like any relationship, "Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity", the reciprocal attention we give to open the dialogue.  When one walks in the world with that sense, just listening.......one cannot be arrogant in the assumption of "aloneness". 

**Listen to the Interview:

The Conversational Nature of Reality - David Whyte interview with Krista Tippet on Onbeing.org.
(http://www.onbeing.org/program/david-whyte-the-conversational-nature-of-reality/8560/audio?embed=1)

The touch of winter

This morning I felt the first faint taste of winter's advent, the going into the dark time, achingly bitter sweet.  I found myself flooded as well with a bone deep feeling of loneliness.  The ghosts of the lost and the past clustered thickly around me at that moment, and I didn't know who I was.  It's not good to live too long among ghosts, they are not meant to linger, but sometimes you must give them your ear.  And the Dark must be welcomed like sleep, or dreams, or the imaginal cells of a coocoon.  

The dark can  return us to forever, to that sometimes terrifying  formlessness, but it brings gifts from the depths.  Like Hecate, offering just a little lantern to light the way.   That little flame can bring  healing and wisdom, even as it breaks your heart. 

 "There's a crack in everything" said Leonard Cohen.  "That's how the light gets in."

I've always loved the poem below, I read it often.  A poem or work of art is something that stays with me, it's a touchstone to come back to.  It speaks to me always, and takes me back to frail moments when I listened, really listened in the depths of a silence only, perhaps, found in a snowbound night, or, as where I live, in the deep desert.  

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

I think it speaks to me so much because we live in a world with so little "listening".  So much noise, constant input, computers, cell phones demanding our frayed and unravelled  attention and it increases every year,the distraction, the stress, the noise.  The endless pressure to connect, produce, promote, promote, promote.    It is hard to be alone, really alone with yourself, to have your attention fully absorbed in listening.   

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

I've been having a kind of meltdown lately.......maybe it's the moon, maybe it's a kind of PTSD, but I find myself crying, anger rises like a volcano, and the emotional roots go down into the dark, bringing up grief, and sometimes great insight.   I have felt quite possessed by violent emotions I thought I had "mastered".  Hah.   The emotional body has its own kind of intelligence, our souls do not always want what our minds think we need,  and sometimes you really do need to fall apart, erupt, lose your mind, it happens, it insists,  it has roots in the dark that go back and back and back to touch your history, and sometimes, to flow from an underground river, what Clarissa Pinkola Estes called "the River beneath the River of the World."    

                           what disturbs
                            and then nourishes
                            has everything we need.

Sometimes a good depression can slow us down and show us something we need to know about the life we live. Is it the life your soul wants to lead?   Sometimes great anger and anxiety can show us what we need to know about about ourselves.   Sometimes tears are overdue, need to be grieved,  and can help us to let go.  Sometimes all of the above can explode, and it's time to change.  All of this opens the heart, and that is where soul intelligence lives, where the whole of us moving through time can be felt, known.

                          What we hate in ourselves
                           is what we cannot know
                           in ourselves 

Every one talks about "healing", as if you could somehow pull out emotional pain like a bad tooth  in a convenient encapsulated  way and it would be gone.  But I've found that many things never "heal", so much as we learn to deepen from them, we know them and can even listen to those  painful psychic states with humility.  They are teachers.  They tell us when to stop, to listen, to hear the voices so difficult, or so vast, all the disenfranchised and unloved people accumulated within us...........they ask us to love ourselves better, in the end.  And thus, others.

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

I have found in working with groups, and myself,  that if you raise energy, you raise energy......and that means that both the "light" and the "dark" are raised, the integral polarities.  We live in a culture that values only Appollonian logic, the  "light", and dismisses the "dark", the unconcious, the intuitive, the unseen.  It is "scary", bad.   But if you raise energy invariably the shadow aspects of participants will come up for review and healing and karmic shift, along with the high energies, the "enlightenment".   This is true of those times when we are triggered in some way as well.   "Enlightenment" must also bring "endarkenment".  

When I lived in Bali, I was struck by the way the sacred clothes were all checkerboards, black and white, black and white.  The curbs of Ubud were painted like a checker board - black and white, yin and yang, Sekala and Niscala, the seen and the unseen, always being brought into balance.  

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

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.

'House of Belonging'

by David Whyte

The End of the Known World - Poem by David Whyte

This summer I made a blog for my friend Zoe, who walked the Camino de Santiago at the age of 68. The scallop shell is the symbol of the Camino, pointing the way all along the long pilgrimage route.   After Compostella, many pilgrims continue on to Finisterre, "Lands End", where they truly finish their pilgrimage before the vastness of the Atlantic ocean.   Recently I remembered this beloved poem by David Whyte, and somehow it reminded me of the New Year as well.........."Because now, you would find a different way to tread, and because, through it all, part of you could still walk on,  no matter how........."

FINISTERRE

The road in the end taking the path the sun had taken,
into the western sea, and the moon rising behind you
as you stood where ground turned to ocean: no way
to your future now

but the way your shadow could take,
walking before you across water,

going where shadows go,

no way to make sense of a world that wouldn't let you pass
except to call an end to the way you had come,
to take out each frayed letter you brought
and light their illumined corners, and to read
them as they drifted through the western light;
to empty your bags;
to sort this and to leave that;

to promise what you needed to promise all along
and to abandon the shoes that had brought you here
right at the water's edge,

not because you had given up
but because now, you would find a different way to tread,
and because, through it all,
part of you could still walk on,
no matter how, over the waves.”

― David Whyte

 

**Photos by Zoe D'Ay