I want to know
if you are prepared to live in a world
with its harsh need
to change you. If you can look back
with firm eyes
saying this is where I stand.
— David Whyte, 'Self-Portrait' [from 𝘍𝘪𝘳𝘦 𝘪𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘌𝘢𝘳𝘵𝘩]
I want to know if you are prepared to live in a world with its harsh need to change you. If you can look back with firm eyes saying this is where I stand. — David Whyte, 'Self-Portrait' [from 𝘍𝘪𝘳𝘦 𝘪𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘌𝘢𝘳𝘵𝘩]
The frontier between what you want out of the world and what the world wants out of you.
On Being • David Whyte — Seeking Language Large Enough
SOMETIMES
by David Whyte
Sometimes
if you move carefully
through the forest,
breathing
like the ones
in the old stories,
who could cross
a shimmering bed of leaves
without a sound,
you come to a place
whose only task
is to trouble you
with tiny
but frightening requests,
conceived out of nowhere
but in this place
beginning to lea... See more
Life is fierce and difficult. There is no life we can live without being subject to grief, loss and heartbreak. Half of every conversation is mediated through disappearance. Thus, there is every reason to want to retreat from life, to carry torches that illuminate only our own view, to make enemies of life and of others, to hate what we cannot unde
... See moreDavid Whyte • David Whyte
rob hardy added
“The ability to ask beautiful questions – often in very un-beautiful moments – is one of the great disciplines of a human life.”
David Whyte
Issue 04 — The Beautiful Truth
The poet David Whyte describes the unfolding of life and career as a “conversation with reality”:
grahamduncan.blog • What's Going on Here, With This Human? - Graham Duncan Blog
It is a terrible and terrifying thing to know what you want to be and then realize you’re the only one standing in your way—to want with every fiber of your soul to be someone different, to escape the “you” you’ve made of yourself, only to fall back into the self you hate, over and over and over again.
James K. A. Smith • On the Road with Saint Augustine: A Real-World Spirituality for Restless Hearts
"A life’s work is not a series of stepping-stones onto which we calmly place our feet, but more like an ocean crossing where there is no path, only a heading, a direction, which, of itself, is in conversation with the elements.”
David Whyte • Crossing the Unknown Sea: Work as a Pilgrimage of Identity
David Sherry and added