Posted at 19:44h
in
Daily Thoughts
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.
by David Whyte, Everything Is Waiting For You
In an interview with Krista Tippet, On Being, the ‘poet philosopher’ David Whyte says, “Poetry is language against which you have no defences.”
This poem hits me that way. And I am so grateful to it and the author for a momentary reason and a way not to listen to the voices of ‘alone’ in my head, so that I might hear the insistence of the universe asking me to ‘Wake up! Notice!’
Today I will get present to something—to the grey of the sky, the bite of the cold wind, the sad eyes of the grocery store clerk—and notice for myself if there might be poetry in it. If it might possibly be seen as evidence of the existence of the Divine.
Our Last Night in the downtown Studio, DTPC, LA CA