The Journey
~ David
Whyte (House of Belonging)
Above the
mountains
the geese
turn into
the light
again
Painting
their
black
silhouettes
on an
open sky.
Sometimes
everything
has to be
inscribed
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.
I’ve read
this poem over and over again in recent days. It’s become a sort of antidote to
the sound of morning or evening commuter traffic rolling past my window, the
bustle of my wife’s preparations for the work day, the unceasing chatter of my
mind as it strives to answer unrelenting queries, “What now? What next? What
are you doing? What will you do?”
Snippets
of memories from my days training as a farmer in Alaska begin to recede. The
memories themselves seem like “the bones of the black sticks left when the fire
has gone out.” I struggle to discern what’s written in the ashes of my life – a
life composed of surprising and complicated leave takings and homecomings, of
passionate pursuits and searching, of dignified and undignified labor, and of
longing for the grand and revelatory arrival, of “something new” to be
revealed.
Instead,
I am invited to practice patience. I must be satisfied with a little more
uncertainty. I must dwell still longer in possibility. The late John O’Donohue’s brief piece “The
Question Holds the Lantern” captures the current beneath my restlessness, the
themes of this journey between life as it was and life as it is being revealed,
this pilgrimage that has not yet culminated in arrival - not yet:
"Once you start to awaken, no one can ever
claim you again for the old patterns. Now you realize how precious your
time here is. You are no longer willing to squander your essence on
undertakings that do not nourish your true self; your patience grows thin with
tired talk and dead language. You see through the rosters of expectation,
which promise you safety and the confirmation of your outer identity. Now
you are impatient for growth, willing to put yourself in the way of change. You want your work to become an
expression of your gift. You want your relationships to voyage beyond
the pallid frontiers to where the danger of transformation dwells. You
want your God to be wild and to call you to where your destiny awaits."
All
around me, people are busy. They are consuming and computing, communicating and
conniving, proposing and posturing and posting, and doing, doing, doing. The rare few are making, creating, mending, tending. Perhaps (who knows?) fewer still are praying,
nurturing, truly healing themselves, other people, our planet. Far too many seem
self-defined by their doing and owning. They tally their worth as so many
meeting minutes, emails, documents, tasks and activities and things. There is a
relentlessness to their pace, an insatiable need to fill space and moments.
Stillness is shunned. There is no time for rest, inactivity, reflection. Always
and only a dull roar of busy-ness.
I listen
to the flow of traffic, alternately uncomfortable with and envious of the
elegance of being linked to one’s activities or products, of being identified
as the role one occupies: web tech,
business analyst, lawyer, nurse, accountant, clerk. Inwardly, in my heart of
hearts, though, I long to break free of this identity with activity. I want to
find a new way of being and loving and living in the world. I want to move at a
pace that accommodates my desire to spend time each day – free from guilt and
self-reproach – to linger in wonder and awe, with poetry and precious people. I
want to observe, to commune, to dwell in gratitude. I want to honor the “being”
in human being, to acknowledge and appreciate the breathe of life that unites
all created things by pausing long enough each day to experience fully this
in-breath and out-breath, to remember its connection to inspiration.
I also want
to work and to earn my livelihood in a way that expresses my intention to honor
people and relationships, to care for creatures and the land, to open my heart
even wider to love and understanding. I want to heal and tend and mend and grow.
I want to build and contribute, to repair and reclaim. I want to make whole and
create anew, ideally working side by side with others who share this desire.
So I am
learning to sit with the discomfort of uncertainty. I am learning to listen to
the whirr of traffic and din of impatient and frenzied hurrying with gratitude
that I can choose to be still. I am slowly learning to idle at a more gentle
RPM, one that allows for noticing and appreciating and tending. I am savoring
the particular purple of the morning glories outside my window, nestled
side-by-side as they are with the hot-orange berries of pyrocantha. I’m
learning how to follow the quick, precise movements of the hummingbirds; the
patient, graceful arcs of the red-shouldered hawks; the impossibly slow steps
of the great egret; the awkwardly determined plodding of the black-necked
stilt. I am making my own awkward, determined path to my yoga mat more
frequently, and learning there a new form of stillness and patience. I am
practicing the hard labor of surrendering to what is and allowing what will be
to take shape in its own time, in God’s time.
When I
need it, which is often, I reach for poetry to comfort me. And I take comfort
from Lynne Ungar, who both asks and answers me:
And you—
what of your rushed and
useful life?
Imagine setting it all down—
papers, plans, appointments,
everything,
leaving only a note:
‘Gone to the fields to be lovely.
Be back when I’m through with
blooming.’
After
all, I believe we are planted here - in these bodies, on this earthly soil – to
bloom. We are meant to grow and thrive. And when our small patch of home soil
somehow becomes polluted or toxic or absent nourishment, we must enrich it.
Sometimes that entails turning it over entirely, amending it with nourishing
contributions from near and far, and then allowing time to work its usual
magic.
I long
for the arrival. And also, I am gradually finding peace in the longing. . .
But perhaps God needs the longing,
wherever else shall it dwell,
Which with kisses and tears and
sighs fills mysterious spaces of air -
And perhaps is invisible soil from
which roots of stars grow and swell -
And the radiant voice across
fields of parting which calls to reunion there?
O my beloved, perhaps in the sky
of longing worlds have been born of our love -
Just as our breathing, in and out,
builds a cradle for life and death?
We are grains of sand, dark with
farewell, lost in births' secret treasure trove,
Around us already perhaps future
moons, suns, and stars blaze in a fiery wreath.
~ Nelly
Sachs
(Translated
by Ruth and Matthew Mead, in A Book of Women Poets from Antiquity to Now, ed.
by Aliki and Willis Barnstone)
