The Winter of Listening ~ David Whyte No one but me by the fire, my hands burning red in the palms while the night wind carries everything away outside. All this petty worry while the great cloak of the sky grows dark and intense round every living thing. What is precious inside us does not care to be known by the mind in ways that diminish its presence. What we strive for in perfection is not what turns us into the lit angel we desire, what disturbs and then nourishes has everything we need. What we hate in ourselves is what we cannot know in ourselves but what is true to the pattern does not need to be explained. Inside everyone is a great shout of joy waiting to be born. Even with the summer so far off I feel it grown in me now and ready to arrive in the world. | All those years listening to those who had nothing to say. All those years forgetting how everything has its own voice to make itself heard. All those years forgetting how easily you can belong to everything simply by listening. And the slow difficulty of remembering how everything is born from an opposite and miraculous otherness. Silence and winter has led me to that otherness. So let this winter of listening be enough for the new life I must call my own. ~ David Whyte ~ (The House of Belonging) |
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"A human being is a part of a whole, called by us _universe_, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest... a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty." Alert Einstein
Albert Einsten said "Well-being and happiness never appeared to me as an absolute aim. I am even inclined to compare such moral aims to the ambitions of a pig."
Sounds a bit harsh, but I agree with him.That's because in my experience, true happiness and well-being really arise from living a life of inspired-action and service, not from trying to be happy. Andrew Harvey, writes about this type of inspired action in his book The Hope: A Guide to Sacred Activism, saying: "The purpose of everything you have been through is to make you a servant of divine love in action in the world." |
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