The Art of Living

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)