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 lead everywhere.

Requests to stop what

you

As T. S. Eliot wrote, in a brilliant and painstaking way: I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope, For hope would be hope for the wrong thing: wait without love for love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.