SECOND SIGHT

by David Whyte

Sometimes, you need the ocean light,

and colours you’ve never seen before

painted through an evening sky.

 

Sometimes you need your God

to be a simple invitation

not a telling word of wisdom.

 

Sometimes you need only the first shyness

that comes from being shown things

far beyond your understanding,

 

so that you can fly and become free

by being still and by being still here.

 

And then there are times you want to be

brought to ground by touch

and touch alone.

 

To know those arms around you

and to make your home in the world

just by being wanted.

 

To see eyes looking back at you,

as eyes should see you at last,

 

seeing you, as you always wanted to be seen,

seeing you, as you yourself

had always wanted to see the world.

 

Gott spricht zu jedem nur, eh er ihn macht

God speaks to each of us as he makes us,

then walks with us silently out of the night.

 These are the words we dimly hear:

You, sent out beyond your recall,

go to the limits of your longing.

Embody me.

Flare up like a flame

and make big shadows I can move in.

Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.

Just keep going.  No feeling is final.

Don't let yourself lose me.

Nearby is the country they call life.

You will know it by its seriousness.

Give me your hand. 

 

      ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

 

Labor Day Sun

Labor Day Sun bathing 55 year old skin
Forbidden,
Of course....at your age
But oh so glorious so
WHO CARES!
That’s me, the strong, the courageous, the powerful one....this woman,
FORBIDDEN
TO BE
Yes, I am a Be...ing, not just a woman,
Who deserves everything you do.
You know who I’m talking about
You, those who cannot see
who cannot hear....cannot allow
Be-ing to be whatever form we take...
Ever hungry....each. step. Hunting for the kill,
the pleasure of it, never the death.
That’s where we are chasms different.
You want the triumph, the rush....the addiction
where you will remain, all your life....
which is death!
Can’t you see the carnage?
And who will stop you
In your tracks?
You give us no room at the table
When it comes to the language of death,
the language of life....the rule of law..
That’s two periods you just saw, in a poem.
Why? Because it’s that serious.
Why do we have to wait?
What do we have to do?
To be released to BE...
AOC willingly takes the risk
Tarana carries the cloak,
the cloak of hidden cries.
A cloak of glorious sight and righteousness
So must you ....so you must!

~ Catherine Duclos

 

The Power of Now Victim Identity

Chapter 8 Enlightened Relationships, pp. 168-169

The first thing to remember is this:  As long as you make an identity for yourself out of the pain, you cannot become free of it.  As long as part of your sense of self is invested in your emotional pain, you will unconsciously resist or sabotage every attempt that you make to heal that pain.  Why?  Quite simply because you want to keep yourself intact, and the pain has become an essential part of you.  This is an unconscious process, and the only way to overcome it is to make it conscious.

 

To suddenly see that you are or have been attached to your pain can be quite a shocking realization.  The moment you realize this, you have broken the attachment.  The pain-body is an energy field, almost like an entity, that has become temporarily lodged in your inner space.  It is life energy that has become trapped, energy that is no longer flowing.  Of course, the pain-body is there because certain things have happened in the past.  It is the living past within you, and if you identify with it, you identify with the past.  A victim identity is the belief that the past is more powerful than the present, which is the opposite of the truth.  It is the belief that other people and what they did to you are responsible for who you are now, for your emotional pain or your inability to be your true self.  The truth is that the only power there is is contained within this moment:   It is the power of your presence.  Once you know that, you also realize that you are responsible for your inner space - nobody else is - and that the past cannot prevail against the power of the Now.

 

My Courageous Life by David Whyte

 

MY COURAGEOUS LIFE

 

has gone ahead

and is looking back,

calling me on.

 

My courageous life

has seen everything

I have been

and everything

I have not

and has

forgiven me,

day after day.

 

My courageous life

still wants

my company:

wants me to

understand

my life as witness

and thus

bequeath me

the way ahead.

 

My courageous life

has the patience

to keep teaching me,

how to invent

my own

disappearance,

and how

once gone,

to reappear again.

 

My courageous life

wants to stop

being ahead of me

so that it can lie

down and rest

deep inside the body

it has been

calling on.

 

My courageous life

wants to be

my foundation,

showing me

day after day

even against my will

 

how to undo myself,

how to surpass myself,

how to laugh as I go

in the face

of danger,

how to invite

the right kind

of perilous

love,

 

how to find

a way

to die

of generosity.

…

 

My Courageous Life

A new adaption of ‘Second Life’

in Pilgrim

Poems by David Whyte

© Many Rivers Press and David Whyte

 

Comfortable insistence...

 

comfortable insistence

rides the wild normal

waves of brilliant turbulence.

 

difference. likeness.

resistance.  surrender.

always more hunting.

 

eyes wide open

closed against rejection

seeking sheltering skies.

 

seamless public acceptance

transforms landscapes

of wounded minds

 

behind oppressive facades

recognition unfurls

lush beauty and

dissolves the binding darkness.

 

~ C. Duclos

The act of love is surrender...

 

The act of love is the surrender of self into life as it is. This is a love larger than our word “love” can contain or express. It embraces all of life and does not judge: tragedy and war, suffering and joy, creativity and destruction. Beauty. Death. The Other. Within this embrace of life as it is, lie acceptance, forgiveness, healing.

When we let go enough into the depths of our being, we are in communion with all of creation. We are center and circumference. One and many. Self and other. Without difference. We are receivers of one another. Then the mystery which surrounds and informs us is served. At depth, we discover that our aloneness and our bondedness are one. Ours is an identity with all beings. Herein lies our healing, the end of loneliness. . . .

To stay grounded I have had to find other ways to honor the paradox of our human identity. I have discovered that it is in the simplest, most minute experiences that I can begin to do that. Then, I am at home, my created self. I belong. Walking. Looking at a tree. Listening to a person, to the wind. Caressing a child. Scraping carrots in the sink. Weeping. Laughing.

Being tender. First, I learned to be tender with myself; to tend the needs of my soul. Then I began to tend the other which is also my self. If I am not tending, caring for some small portion of the living creation, how can I commune with that creation, be it the earth or a child, in any but the most sentimental way? A woman learns, in caring for an infant, that she becomes bonded. A person who tends the land or gives to another discovers the same bond. These are not moral niceties, they are part of the mystery. They are law.

In this kind of communion with life, new languages arise in our bodies: languages of awe and wonder, gratitude and a joy that is overflowing. They soften us. . . . The more gratitude or awe I feel, the more life shows forth its beauty and terror, the more my life is graced. These are the languages of being. Of being alive. This is a life lived with passion: com-passion. . . .

There we await the mystery.

 

Richard Rohr The Rhineland Mystics

 

August 2 - August 7, 2020/ Anne Hillman