Destiny

Fateetech/Magnific

 A word that invites 

belief or disbelief

Destiny

always has a possessor, as in my destiny or your destiny or her destiny; it gives a sense of something we cannot avoid or something waiting for us; it is a word of storybook or mythic dimension. Destiny is hardly used in everyday conversation; it is a word that invites belief or disbelief: we reject the ordering of events by some fated, unseen force or we agree that there seems to be a greater hand than our own, working at the edges of even the most average life. But speaking of destiny not only grants us a sense of our own possibilities but gives us an intimation of our flaws: 

we sense, along with Shakespeare, that what is unresolved or unspoken in human character might overwhelm the better part of ourselves.

When we choose between these two poles, of mythic triumph or fated failure, we may miss the everyday conversational essence of destiny: our future influenced by the very way we hold the conversation of life itself, never mind any actions we might take or neglect to take. Two people, simply by looking at the future in radically different ways, have completely different futures awaiting them, no matter their immediate course of action. Even the same course of action, coming from a different way of shaping the conversation, will result in a different outcome. We are shaped by our shaping of the world and are shaped again in turn. The way we face the world alters the face we see in the world.

Strangely, every person always lives out their destiny, no matter what they do, according to the way they shape the conversation, but that destiny may be lived out on the level of consummation or complete frustration, through experiencing a homecoming or a distant sense of exile, or more likely some gradation along the spectrum that lies between. It is still our destiny, our life, but the sense of satisfaction involved and the possibility of fulfilling its promise may depend upon a brave participation, a willingness to hazard ourselves in a difficult world, a certain form of wild generosity with our gifts; a familiarity with our own depth, our own discovered, surprising breadth; and always, a long practised and robust vulnerability equal to what any future may offer. 

Our destiny is fated not only by great powers beyond our beckoning horizon but by the very way we shape and hold the everyday conversations of a familiar life.

David Whyte

in, Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning in Everyday Words

Letting Go

Rob Christiaans

Finding the Secret, 

Hidden but Difficult Beauty 

in Every Ending

The ending of relationships, the ending of friendships, the ending of a work, a conversation that is making us smaller, a book we are trying to write, or even a single line of a poem: all of them difficult, all of them, in their particular form of ending, necessary. 

We find most endings difficult and nearly all of them hurtful and traumatic and yet almost always afterwards, after each ending, we find we would never voluntarily reverse things and go back to our old life.

The poet Rilke said 

‘Be ahead of all parting’ 

as an invitation to a radically anticipatory way of living that is just as committed to letting go as it is to taking on.

The stakes are always high in every letting go and every ending. 

The way we leave can shape our new life to the good or to the bad. 

In the very seed of the ending and the integrity with which we make the passage from old to new, grows the fresh and vibrant life that emerges so surprisingly from our difficult moving on.

The ability to anticipate these new arrivals and hold to what is firm and true through all our successive experiences of falling apart is exactly what makes a foundation for a new life, a new home, a new love or a new work. 

The hidden beauty of endings almost always lives in the letting go. 

What is marvelous and truly beautiful in a new life always arises from what is initially invisible, from what seems like a secret; from what is hidden, both inside us and in the very physical world into which we are stepping.

 David Whyte

No One Told Me

shutterstock

 

No one told me

it would lead to this.

No one said

there would be secrets

I would not want to know.

No one told me about seeing,

seeing brought me

loss and a darkness I could not hold.

No one told me about writing

or speaking.

Speaking and writing poetry

I unsheathed the sharp edge

of experience that led me here.

No one told me

it could not be put away.

I was told once, only,

in a whisper,

“The blade is so sharp—

It cuts things together

—not apart.”

This is no comfort.

My future is full of blood,

from being blindfold,

hands outstretched,

feeling a way along its firm edge.

David Whyte

Orphan Lamb

pngtree

A black lamb centered in a green field,

his thin breathed-into sides confirming

his bereft call for milk amongst the bedraggled

white fleeced mothers, looking on,

who stood and watched, not hearing

‘plaintive’ or ‘lost’ or ‘waiting to be fed’

but the cry of another mother’s son

needing to find his own way back

to the flow-source of milk and the warm

fleece hug of his mother’s belly

swaying above the teat. They would stand

above his black skeletal form beneath the trees

dropping their heads to drive him off

and stamp and turn again, nudging their own

half hesitant, half happy lambs away.

We walked the fields an hour looking

for a mother standing alone or with a single lamb,

the burnt sun falling to a misted light,

the trees become silhouettes, black as the lamb itself,

our eyes and ears in the crowded field

bent to the ancient prayer rising around us,

the evensong of grief and motherhood,

call and response, wanting and not wanting,

the church bell call of a passing rook

sounding the hour as the last pale

just burnt gold of a cloud framed

our shadows, walking the lit vale

toward the car, toward loss, toward

something in our low disappointed voices

trying to remember from childhood both

the sense of source and the act of being pushed away,

where we were wanted and where we were not.

In the end, we took him home, to a waiting mother

who had lost her own, penned in a barn,

her grown head turned away in the wooden crush

so the lamb could drink and hours later

in the sweet hay strewn dark of the enclosing barn

the mother ewe could smell her own milk

tasted through the lamb’s own breath

their mutual life come to life by self-recognition,

the black lamb pulling mightily at the dugs

as the mother looked on, as we looked on,

and looked at one another

passing the tiny airline bottle,

the faint breath of whisky from our nip

misting and pluming in the half-lit barn.

The single, full malt taste of something met,

a breathing through in the chest, a way of coming to

and of tasting again, the essence of wanting to live,

something paid for by our seeking and our patience,

just a tang, a hint, a mere breath in the glow light,

of being born again.

David Whyte

in, The Bell and the Blackbird

Despite All

Adobe Stock

“The quarrels of popes and kings, 

with wars and pestilences in every page; 

the men all so good for nothing and 

hardly any women at all—it is very tiresome.” 

—Jane Austen

Sometimes the choices we make around relationships and work seem to have no choice in them at all. Each of us grapples with forces far larger than our goals or ourselves: each of us wrestles with our family inheritance, our educational possibilities, the lucky or unlucky DNA that ordains our health and, especially, the fateful time in history into which we were born.

There are other powers we like to forget. 

Nature can be a deadly arbiter of our future, independent of our human need to plan. Nature’s winds can drive us out of a city, destroy our schools and undermine a health system for years to come. A tsunami can devastate a thousand miles of coastline, and constant rain may inundate half a nation. 

As human beings, we have a necessary conceit about our own ability to influence events. 

The truth about our own modest contribution might immobilize us: much easier then, to tell ourselves a story about how much we make our own reality. 

The United States, that supposed bedrock home of upward mobility, is actually one of the developed industrial nations where people are most likely to live and die in the class to which they were born. We are creatures who like to believe our own publicity, and we do not like to face powers that can easily surpass and encompass our best hopes. We hope always for a free pass to circumvent forces that humble us on a daily basis.

Although we can never escape these overarching powers and difficulties, it can be instructive to look to those who have made sense of their life or their work in the midst of overwhelming circumstances, circumstances where we would have every reason either not to try or to look the other way and pretend they did not exist.

Shakespeare’s sonnet 64 is unstintingly courageous in this regard: it demonstrates the kind of courage needed to look the leveled World Trade Center towers in the eye, to survey a devastated New Orleans or to say goodbye for the last time in the face of a loved one’s death.

When I have seen by Time’s fell hand defaced

The rich-proud cost of outworn buried age;

When sometime lofty towers I see down-razed

And brass eternal slave to mortal rage;

When I have seen the hungry ocean gain

Advantage on the kingdom of the shore,

And the firm soil win of the watery main,

Increasing store with loss, and loss with store;

When I have seen such interchange of state,

Or state it self confounded to decay,

Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate

That Time will come and take my love away.

This thought is as a death which cannot choose

But weep to have, that which it fears to lose.

Shakespeare

David Whyte

Ambition

 

stockcake

Ambition

is a word that lacks any real ambition. Ambition is desire frozen, the current of a vocational life immobilised and over-concretised to set unforgiving goals. Ambition may be essential for the young and as yet unrealised life, but becomes the essential obstacle of any mature life. Ambition abstracts us from the underlying elemental nature of the creative conversation while providing us the cover of a target that has become false through over-description, overfamiliarity or too much understanding.

The ease of having an ambition is that it can be explained to others; the very disease of ambition is that it can be so easily explained to others. What is worthy of a life’s dedication does not want to be known by us in ways that diminish its actual sense of presence. Everything true to itself has its own secret language and an internal intentionality with a secret, surprising flow, even to the person who supposedly puts it all in motion.

Ambition ultimately withers all secrets in its glare before those secrets have had time to come to life from within, and then thwarts the generosity and maturity that ripens the discourse of a lifetime’s dedication to a work.

We may direct the beam of ambition to illuminate a certain corner of the future world, but ultimately it can reveal to us only those dreams with which we have already become familiar. Ambition left to itself, like the identity of the average billionaire, always becomes tedious, its only object the creation of larger and larger empires of control; but a true vocation calls us out beyond ourselves, breaks our heart in the process and then humbles, simplifies and enlightens us about the hidden, core nature of the work that enticed us in the first place. We find that, all along, we had what we needed from the beginning and that in the end we have returned to its essence, an essence we could not understand until we had experienced the actual heartbreak of the journey.

No matter the self-conceited importance of our labours we are all compost for worlds we cannot yet imagine. Ambition takes us toward that horizon, but not over it – that line will always recede before our controlling hands. But a calling is a conversation between our physical bodies, our work, our intellects and imaginations, and a new world that is itself the territory we seek. A vocation always includes the specific, heartrending way we will fail at our attempt to live fully. A true vocation always metamorphoses both ambition and failure into compassion and understanding for others.

Ambition takes willpower and constant applications of energy to stay on a perceived bearing; but a serious vocational calling demands a constant attention to the unknown gravitational field that surrounds us and from which we recharge ourselves, as if breathing from the atmosphere of possibility itself. A life’s work is not a series of stepping-stones, onto which we calmly place our feet, but more like an ocean crossing where there is no path, only a heading, a direction, in conversation with the elements. Looking back, we see the wake we have left as only a brief glimmering trace on the waters.

Ambition is natural to the first steps of youth, who must experience its essential falsity to know the larger reality that stands behind it, but held on to too long, and especially in eldership, it always comes to lack surprise, turns the last years of the ambitious into a second childhood, and makes the once successful into an object of pity.

The authentic watermark running through the background of a life’s work is an arrival at generosity and, as a mark of that generosity, delight in the hopes of the young: and the giving away to them, not only of rewards that may have been earned but the reward in the secret itself, the core artistry that made the journey a journey.

Perhaps the greatest legacy we can leave from our work is not to instil ambition in others, though this may be the first way we describe its arrival in our life, but the passing on of a sense of sheer privilege, of having found a road, a way to follow, and then having been allowed to walk it, often with others, with all its difficulties and minor triumphs; the underlying primary gift of having been both a witness to and a full participant in the conversation.

David Whyte

in, Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words

Sweet Darkness

Wallpapers

 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 home

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

in, The House of Belonging

Twice Blessed

Yuri Arcurs

So that I stopped

there

and looked

into the waters

seeing not only

my reflected face

but the great sky

that framed

my lonely figure

and after a moment

I lifted my hands

and then my eyes

and I allowed myself

to be astonished

by the great

everywhere

calling to me

like an old

and unspoken

invitation,

made new

by the sun

and the spring,

and the cloud

and the light,

like something

both

calling to me

and radiating

from where I stood,

as if I could

understand

everything

I had been given

and everything ever

taken from me,

as if I could be

everything I have ever

learned

and everything

I could ever know,

as if I knew

both the way I had come

and, secretly,

the way

underneath

I was still

promised to go,

brought together,

like this, with the

unyielding ground

and the symmetry

of the moving sky,

caught in still waters.

Someone I have been,

and someone

I am just,

about to become,

something I am

and will be forever,

the sheer generosity

of being loved

through loving:

the miracle reflection

of a twice blessed life.

David Whyte

The Creative Path

 

Carrying What is Hidden 

as a Gift to Others

If a fool would persist in his folly, 

he would become wise.

— William Blake

The difficult secret about creativity is that it is an invitation to travel the path of longing—longing for real meaning, real connection, and continual nourishing surprise that can enliven and even transform the lives of others.

We associate creativity with discipline and long hours but long hours make sense only if we are following a meaningful central trajectory—one that in the creative act itself seems to issue from our bodies like a comet’s tail out into the world.

Creativity is an invitation to transgress—once we take the step toward creating, we always betray our known self and the inherited stories we hold close, the scaffolding of our entire identity, and the structures and systems that held us in place. This is why it feels so difficult. This is why we feel as if we are ‘blocked’, we really, actually feel as if we are losing our sense of self. This is why the creative path can feel so distant and elusive: to create is to betray your home and set off into a distant unknown place.

Creativity demands choosing longing over belonging: that choice asks us to risk losing grip with what makes sense—to drop into a state where the familiar self cannot follow a known path. So many things can be created easily and unconsciously—chaos, resentment, envy—even destruction—can be created on a daily basis without effort or intention. Meaningful creativity is something else entirely—it puts us in cultivated, intimate companionship with the world and with the struggles of other human beings—fellow creatures trying to get things right and failing awkwardly most of the time.

To follow the path of creativity is to stay in the unknown long enough for it to become aliveness—and to shape that aliveness into forms of beauty and life-changing insight—the gift of being given new eyes or ears for this world or even a new mind for an imagined future. 

These dreams beneath the surface made real through our creative gifts, are the fruits of a long and conscious path—a harvest that asks us to keep listening to the inner urgencies of our life—and the way those urgencies arrive in all the hours of our everyday lives.

Bringing our inner and outer worlds together. 

Following a creative path that always asks us to shape a way of being equal to every mode of doing.

David Whyte

STILL POSSIBLE

Fulmandi

It is still possible to be kind to yourself,

to drop constraints and fall often

to your knees, it’s not too late now, to bow

to what beckons, the world still swimming

around you as you kneel transfigured

by what sweeps on, it’s still possible

to leave every fearful former self

in the wake of newly-heard words

issuing from an astonished mouth.

It’s still possible to feel your body

as fully here and fully you, but not

quite your own, to find you can live

both entirely as yourself and in

the lovely anonymous multitude

of elements around you, that you

have always been a brother and sister

to the clouds beyond the window;

or have lived your secret, unspoken

marriage with the pale blue sky

for more years than you could ever

remember; and that you have always

been proud to be, through all

your difficulties, a loyal companion

and friend to the foaming tide,

coming and going, appearing

and disappearing with you,

and for you, day after day

on the ceaseless shore.

It’s still possible amongst all the never ending 

movement to hold the necessary anchorage, 

while having a mind for the long migration,

to be ready to up and go and then surprisingly, 

be gone:

 

It’s not too late to imagine that the days 

to come are the lost children you are still 

to bring to birth and bring to maturity, 

and that you are ready once more to be 

selfless on their behalf, setting them to rights 

when they fall, listening when they lose 

faith, being that mother or father, 

who through all their difficulties, 

gives the gift of constant witness. 

It’s still possible to intuit a magnificent, 

individual arrival, that brings you still 

closer to the accompanying faraway crowd; 

to live bravely and always, as someone said,

‘to the point of tears’, to realize that you 

have always had your life shattered 

and your heart broken and your faith 

tested by loving too much and too often 

and that all along, it was never too much 

and never too often, and that you were 

never, ever, fully broken.

Yes, it’s still possible not to hold so tightly

to what you think is true, to bend your head

and assume humility beneath the eaves

of a still spreading sky, to feel in the rain

upon your upturned face, how you have

always been friends with the distant

horizon, no matter how far and how

faint its call.

Yes, it’s still possible to be a soul

on its way to a beautiful, beckoning

and bountiful somewhere,

looking for the gift you will bring back

to the time of your birth, 

so that you can start living again, 

from the very first moment you came into this life,

but this time with the cleaner, 

earned simplicity of knowing what it has taken you so long to learn: 

to ask for forgiveness by being forgiveness: 

to live more generously, by greeting yourself more generously, 

and then to dance more bravely, 

to speak more suddenly,

and with a free heart, 

to undo as you go all you do wrong, 

and to right the wronged

and unsettle the self-righteous, 

sharing the secret to happiness with everyone.

Yes, oh yes, it’s still possible to taste

the natural God-given sweetness

in every cloud in the sky, in every little

you eat; in every breath that you take,

in every hand that you touch, in every day

that you wake, in every tear that you shed,

in every voice still waiting to call you,

in every once solid, immoveable door,

now calling you through; and in every

single blessed moment turning to the next.

It’s still possible to fully understand

you have always been the place

where the miracle has happened:

that you have been since your birth

the bread given and the wine lifted,

the change witnessed and the change itself,

that you have been all along,

a goodness that can continue

to be a goodness to itself.

It’s still possible in the end

to realize why you are here

and why you have endured,

and why you might have suffered

so much, so that in the end,

you could witness love, miraculously

arriving from nowhere, crossing

bravely as it does, out of darkness,

from that great and spacious stillness

inside you, to the simple,

light-filled life of being said.

David Whyte

in, STILL POSSIBLE

The journey

Posterlounge

Above the mountains

the geese turn into

the light again

Painting their

black silhouettes

on an open sky.

Sometimes everything

has to be

enscribed across

the heavens

so you can find

the one line

already written

inside you.

Sometimes it takes

a great sky

to find that

small, bright

and indescribable

wedge of freedom

in your own heart.

Sometimes with

the bones of the black

sticks left when the fire

has gone out

someone has written

something new

in the ashes of your life.

You are not leaving

you are arriving.

David Whyte 

Analysis (ai): The poem compares the journey of life to the movement of geese, highlighting the cyclical nature of existence. The geese symbolize the soul's transformation and return to its origins. The poem's imagery of the open sky and the heavens represents the vastness of the spiritual realm, where truth is revealed.

The poem's structure resembles a journey itself, with each stanza representing a different stage. 

The beginning explores the process of finding guidance and enlightenment. 

The middle section emphasizes the transformative power of adversity and the need for internal exploration. 

The final stanza offers a sense of arrival and acceptance of the ongoing nature of the journey.

Compared to the author's other works, the poem maintains his characteristic focus on spirituality and the human connection to nature. It aligns with the time period's interest in introspection and the search for meaning in a rapidly changing world. The poem's message of hope and resilience resonates with readers seeking solace and guidance during challenging times.

Everything is waiting for you

Greg Rakozy

 

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

Analysis: 

This poem explores the interconnectedness of life and the importance of mindfulness. It suggests that the speaker's perception of isolation is a result of their own preoccupation, rather than an objective reality. The poem encourages the reader to recognize the beauty and significance of everyday objects and experiences, and to see themselves as part of a vast and intricate web of existence.

Compared to the author's other works, this poem shares a commitment to exploring the relationship between humanity and nature, and the importance of paying attention to the present moment. However, it is less abstract and more accessible than some of his other works, using concrete imagery and straightforward language to convey its message.

In the context of the time period, the poem reflects a growing awareness of the interconnectedness of all living things and the importance of environmental stewardship. It also speaks to the human need for connection and belonging, which was particularly relevant during a time of social and political upheaval.

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

Where Many Rivers Meet

Iceland's Fjallsjökull Glacier

 All the water below me came from above.

All the clouds living in the mountains

gave it to the rivers

who gave it to the sea, which was their dying.

?

And so I float on cloud become water,

central sea surrounded by white mountains,

the water salt, once fresh,

clouds fall and streams rush, tree root and tide bank

leading to the rivers' mouths

and the mouths of the rivers sing into the sea,

the stories buried in the mountains

give out into the sea

and the sea remembers

and sings back

from the depth

where nothing is forgotten

David Whyte

Leaving the Island

 

Steven Michael

It must have been

the slant of the light,

the sheer cross-grain of rain

against the summer sun,

the way the island appeared

gifted, out of the gleam

and the depth of distance,

so that when you turned

to look again,

the scend of the sea

had carried you on,

under the headland

and into the waiting harbour.

And after the pilgrim lanes,

and the ruined chapel,

the lads singing beneath the window,

and the Corn-Crake calling from

a corner of a field,

after the gull cries and the sea-hush

at the back of the island,

it was the way, standing still

or looking out,

walking or even talking

with others in the evening bar,

holding your drink

and laughing with the rest,

that you realized–part of you

had already dropped to its knees,

to pray, to sing, to look–

to fall in love with everything

and everyone again, that someone

from deep inside you had come out

into the sea-light to raise its hands

and forgive everyone in your short life

you thought you hadn’t, and that all along

you had been singing your quiet way

through the rosary of silence

that held their names.

Above all, the way afterwards,

you thought you had left the island

but hadn’t, the way you knew

you had gone somewhere

into the shimmering light

and come out again on the tide

as you knew you had to,

as someone who would return

and live in the world again,

a man granted just a glimpse,

a woman granted just a glimpse,

some one half a shade braver,

a standing silhouette in the stern,

holding the rail,

riding the long waves back,

ready for the exile we call a home.

David Whyte

Santiago

Freepik

The road seen, then not seen, the hillside

hiding then revealing the way you should take,

the road dropping away from you as if leaving you

to walk on thin air, then catching you, holding you up,

when you thought you would fall,

and the way forward always in the end

the way that you followed, the way that carried you

into your future, that brought you to this place,

no matter that it sometimes took your promise from you,

no matter that it had to break your heart along the way:

the sense of having walked from far inside yourself

out into the revelation, to have risked yourself

for something that seemed to stand both inside you

and far beyond you, that called you back

to the only road in the end you could follow, walking

as you did, in your rags of love and speaking in the voice

that by night became a prayer for safe arrival,

so that one day you realized that what you wanted

had already happened long ago and in the dwelling place

you had lived in before you began,

and that every step along the way, you had carried

the heart and the mind and the promise

that first set you off and drew you on and that you were

more marvelous in your simple wish to find a way

than the gilded roofs of any destination you could reach:

as if, all along, you had thought the end point might be a city

with golden towers, and cheering crowds,

and turning the corner at what you thought was the end

of the road, you found just a simple reflection,

and a clear revelation beneath the face looking back

and beneath it another invitation, all in one glimpse:

like a person and a place you had sought forever,

like a broad field of freedom that beckoned you beyond;

like another life, and the road still stretching on.

David Whyte

Background

We are lonely today, 

not because we are losing contact 

with other individuals, but because 

we have lost our friendship 

with the sky and the moon and the stars

 that create the canopy beneath 

which all of our 

human relationships and friendships 

flourish and prosper 

in mutual awe.

Background is not the shy, retiring, you-go-first word it seems to want to be. 

Background is underestimated and calls on us to widen our vision and open to a greater breadth of attention.

Foreground dominates our lives, is overestimated in importance and hides the greater context from which it has emerged. The neglect of background is the source of much of our present loneliness and most definitely, our present unhappiness.

Background is always what we start to pay attention to when we start to pay real attention. 

In Zen practice, one of the signs of deepening states of presence and intimacy with our surrounding reality is the way background stops being background: the way we stop choosing between near and far, past and present, near objects and those that seem to lie over the horizon of our understanding. 

Background shapes our seeing of a thing as much as the thing itself: the sun around a silhouetted maple actually outlines what we see as the shape of the tree. A tree in our real, grounded, physical apprehension of the world is made of light and its absence, as much as it is made of wood.

Foreground has come to be a kind of obsession in our lives making us unwitting slaves to too many of the things that are placed right in front of our noses: numbers, results, graphs, the blurred screen full of endless messages. We obsess with what individual people seem to be saying to us rather than the vaster sweep of human mythological dynamics that lie behind their speech. Facebook under all its multi-headed disguises of Instagram, WhatsApp and Threads is aptly named: trying as it is to be the first thing we see, everyday, in front of our noses, literally in our faces.

Foreground is where we recognise too late, in the news, most of our problems but also, most of the possibilities that have just slipped through our hands, all of which can only emerge from the greater context behind the news: the living, breathing ever evolving background. 

Foreground, without background is where we always come to recognise things too late. 

The ability to pay attention to background from the very beginning grants us a disguised clairvoyance in making it look as if we are able to look into the future. We understand what is about to happen, by looking now at the background, from where all our problems and possibilities first emerge.

Paying attention to background as much as foreground is not only an introduction to our greater surroundings: paying attention to background tells us we are already in a conversation with greater worlds and have been for longer than we know. Bringing background into our life tells us how much we have been defending and fighting against acknowledging everything that has been there all along and has often been travelling faithfully from afar to knock on our door.

Background and backdrop is the ultimate context of community. 

The birdsong, the wind in the trees, the eyes of the passing stranger trying to catch our eye for a morning hello; and even, and at the end of our walk, the warm hubbub of a coffee shop filled with waking voices. Background is our substrate of belonging, a shared communal background is our first remedy for loneliness.

We have grown and evolved over the millennia with the green of grass and leaves to find every shade of that colour soothing and inviting, and with the wind ruffling the blades, to find refreshment: with the blue of the sky to find it scintillating, and with the spaciousness it creates in our minds, literally up-lifting.We are lonely today, not because we are losing contact with other individuals, but because we have lost our friendship with the sky and the moon and the stars that create the canopy beneath which all of our human relationships and friendships flourish and prosper in mutual awe.

Direct contact with another foreground face and constant contact with all the foreground explanations we conspire to make together, is only a temporary cure for loneliness, often leading to disappointment in the specifics of a too predictable story and a too familiar life. 

To share the breezy morning sky by the broad Atlantic with a passing stranger or live music when crammed into a pub full of unknown but foot-tapping fellow listeners is another form of closeness, one sustained by a friendship with the wider world rather than making foreground relationships and foreground naming bear all the weight. 

Background is strangely a doorway to a close up intimacy, one that does not need the burden of asking of the relationship - ‘What now?’

We share a sky, the sound of the rain, the appreciation of music with almost all our fellow human beings. The shared, greater context of our surrounding life is what grants the real possibility of deep friendship to our foreground friends. Even prisoners who rarely see the sky but who share a proper sympathetic understanding of their enclosed background, and their curtailed background lives, are given, through their prison walls, the possible intimacies of friendship.

Background is half of what we see and hear; background is half of what we do not see and hear. Background is our visible and invisible helpmate, waiting for us to raise our heads to look and see. Background is the constellation of swirling forces out of which our life emerges, and background holds our future, the horizon in our life that always draws us on; a life that can find true definition only through what always lies beyond it.

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 day

that 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 waiting desk?

David Whyte

in,The House of Belonging