Sublime

one of the abiding themes of this book—that many of the hopes we hold for a particular marriage are never consummated in the way we originally imagined.

Poetry is the art of overhearing ourselves say things from which it is impossible to retreat. A true line acts like a lightning rod in a storm.

The poet needs the practicalities of making a living to test and temper the lyricism of insight and observation. The corporation needs the poet’s insight and powers of attention to weave the inner world of soul and creativity with the outer world of form and matter.

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

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