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Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words
Beauty is an achieved state of both deep attention and self-forgetting: the self-forgetting of seeing, hearing, smelling or touching that erases our separation, our distance, our fear of the other.
David Whyte • Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words
Courage is what love looks like when tested by the simple everyday necessities of being alive.
David Whyte • Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words
Human beings are always, and always will be, a frontier between what is known and what is not known. The act of turning any part of the unknown into the known is simply an invitation for an equal measure of the unknown to flow in and re-establish that frontier: to reassert the far inward, as yet unknown horizon of an individual life; to make us
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To feel a full and untrammeled joy is to have become fully generous; to allow ourselves to be joyful is to have walked through the doorway of fear, the dropping away of the anxious worried self felt like a thankful death itself, a disappearance, a giving away, overheard in the laughter of friendship, the vulnerability of happiness felt suddenly as
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We are neither what we think we are nor entirely what we are about to become, we are neither purely individual nor fully a creature of our community, but an act of becoming that can never be held in place by a false form of nomenclature. No matter our need to find a place to stand amidst the onward flow of the world, the real foundation of the self
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JOY is a meeting place, of deep intentionality and of self-forgetting, the bodily alchemy of what lies inside us in communion with what formerly seemed outside, but is now neither, but become a living frontier, a voice speaking between us and the world:
David Whyte • Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words
but a robust incarnation into the unknown unfolding vulnerability of existence, where we acknowledge how powerless we feel, how little we actually know, how afraid we are of not knowing and how astonished we are by the generous measure of loss that is conferred upon even the most average life.
David Whyte • Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words
In real pain we often have nothing to give back other than our own gratitude, a smile that perhaps looks half like a grimace or the passing friendship of the thankful moment to a helpful stranger,
David Whyte • Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words
Loneliness is the very state that births the courage to continue calling, and when fully lived can undergo its own beautiful reversal, becoming in its consummation the far horizon that answers back.