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Let the Sun into Your Heart

Be taught now, among the trees and rocks,

how the discarded is woven into shelter,

learn the way things hidden and unspoken

slowly proclaim their voice in the world.

Find that far inward symmetry

to all outward appearances, apprentice

yourself to yourself, begin to welcome back

all you sent away and be a new annunciation,

let the sun into your heart and broaden

your spacious mind, make yourself a door

through which to be hospitable,

even to the stranger in you.

…

Revised Excerpt from ‘Coleman’s Bed’ in 'Essentials'

© David Whyte and Many Rivers Press

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We join spokes together in a wheel,
but it is the center hole
that makes the wagon move.

We shape clay into a pot,
but it is the emptiness inside
that holds whatever we want.

We hammer wood for a house,
but it is the inner space
that makes it livable.

We work with being,
but non-being is what we use.

Tao Te Ching, trans.

Stephen Mitchell.

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Sometimes

if you move carefully

through the forest

breathing

like the ones

in the old stories

who could cross

a shimmering bed of dry 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 are doing right now,

and

to stop what you

are becoming

while you do it,

questions

that can make

or unmake

a life,

questions

that have patiently

waited for you,

questions

that have no right

to go away.

- David Whyte, Sometimes

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#Youtube

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If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy,

don’t hesitate. Give in to it. There are plenty

of lives and whole towns destroyed or about

to be. We are not wise, and not very often

kind. And much can never be redeemed.

Still, life has some possibility left. Perhaps this

is its way of fighting back, that sometimes

something happens better than all the riches

or power in the world. It could be anything,

but very likely you notice it in the instant

when love begins. Anyway, that’s often the case.

Anyway, whatever it is, don’t be afraid

of its plenty. Joy is not made to be a crumb.

"Don't Hesitate" by Mary Oliver

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https://www.instagram.com/reel/CxKdfq-Imof/?igshid=MTc4MmM1YmI2Ng==

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There are poems that are never written, that simply move across the mind like skywriting on a still day: slowly the first word drifts west, the last letters dissolve on the tongue, and what is left is the pure blue of insight, without cloud or comfort.

~ ‘There are Poems’, by Linda Pastan From Carnival Evening: New and Selected Poems, 1968-1998 W.W. Norton, 1998.