On how we see and are seen

This is a deep poem, one of D.Whytes best I think. It speaks to the relationship of how we are seen as a function in part of how we see. How we are engaged by the world as a partial function of how we relate to the world.

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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 it 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

On Work as Life

Three ideas are compelling me these days:
Work
Focus
Discipline.

This poem is about the meaning and experiencing life when the choice is made to abandon the overwhelming stifle that would take over our life and make it so the abundance of experience and life is missed.

So it is.

There are many ways to die.
And many ways to live.
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Shake off this sadness, and recover your spirit
sluggish you will never see the wheel of fate
that brushes your heel as it turns going by,
the man who wants to live is the man in whom life is abundant.

Now you are only giving food to that final pain
which is slowly winding you in the nets of death,
but to live is to work, and the only thing which lasts
is the work; start then, turn to the work.

Throw yourself like seed as you walk, and into your own field,
don’t turn your face for that would be to turn it to death,
and do not let the past weigh down your motion.

Leave what’s alive in the furrow, what’s dead in yourself,
for life does not move in the same way as a group of clouds;
from your work you will be able one day to gather yourself.

~ Miguel De Unamuno ~

Let’s find a Way today

There is a need to find this way of personal integrity stitching our days “each to each” in a simple seeking, and becoming.
This is an idea with deep consequences for personal satisfaction and happiness, as well as the predicate for being effective in the world in those things we care about “out there”.
Now…making the distinction of what are those things that do and do not matter…. That feels like life work.

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Let’s find a Way today,
that can take us to tomorrow.
We’ll follow that Way,
A Way like flowing water.