There is a place
That only you can create
Where all the parts
Of your Self
Burdened, abandoned, exiled
Can come home again
So that everything that has happened to you
And especially the specters of things that did not happen
Are nurtured, protected,
And loved
In the fragile beginnings
Of self-compassion
Nothing wants to hurt any part of you here
Nothing in you is bad or unworthy
Shame cannot breathe here
But know this
Your journey demands discomfort
You must willingly enter the emotional turbulence
When it comes
At times, you will feel exhausted
And secretly yearn to return to the familiar suffering
When this happens
Let your exhaustion be a revelation
Of truth from which there is no retreat
In a courageous friendship
With everything exiled within
Your meeting place is not something found
No one can take you there
You must create it
With a fierce imagination
That even makes Reality wonder if it can be something more
And in this imagined place
Life will come to you
As if finding a lost child
My meeting place
Is inside a forest
Both within and out there
On the bank of a stream
I watch the water
Flowing down a gentle slope
Embracing the rocks in endless gratitude
Creating myriad pathways
Yielding to that which cannot be moved
In a confluence of body, mind, and spirit
While the trees whisper to me
About strength, resilience, and stillness
Wherever I am in the world
Or in my life
I can retreat to my meeting place by the stream
And always find wise counsel
For there are figures there that watch over me
Even through my darkest days
The water says there are others
Who will also offer help
You must find your own trusted advisors
They are there where they have always been
Inside
Waiting for you
Now
Is the time to befriend all of
Your burdened, abandoned, and exiled parts
And call them home
And allow each one
To finally release the burden they have carried
Over all these years
Inside memories you don't know you have
Hiding in flesh and bone
Secretly emerging as thoughts, feelings, and behaviors
That haunt you
And surpirse you
Letting the energy of their exile move
In, through, and around you
So you can properly honor your suffering
Not to find a solution or even an end
But to make yourself large enough to hold it
For the rest of your days
In compassionate embrace
I wonder
Maybe then, after all these decades
My body can come to know rest
And my mind can know presence
In every meeting place
Yours and mine
There is Love
Nothing seeks to punish you
Or belittle you
You can carry no sin here
And as you humble yourself to the work
Even the trees will turn to watch
The journey toward True Self
After more than sixty years
You discover what has haunted your life since the beginning
And so you grieve
Your scattered life
But then
You hear the trees whisper
This is your life
And in that moment
Your grief becomes a trusted advisor
While the consolation of the stream
Carries you
Toward the possibility of finally embracing
The privilege of being alive
Turn Away
Sometimes you must let go
Of all the usual desires
That conspired to lead you to this place
Of contingency, false urgency, and exhaustion
Nearly sixty years have passed
And as your body begins its retreat
You are still disappointed
To find yourself on that beaten and tired path
Remaining faithful to your conditioning
And the rigid discipline of your own inertia
Never turning away
Never looking in the other direction
That believes in you
Because it refuses to show you the way
The path you still follow
After all these years
Offers the comfort of the familiar
And the fulfillment of expectations
Not of your own making
This is not your path
You have always known this
It belongs to that other self
The one who has always been too frightened to
Turn away
But there is a knowing inside
Coming from an invisible source
Calling you toward the wild terrain
That has always been there waiting for you
Where there are no paths to follow
Where there is no one to advise you
Where your distractions are your only guide
And where you must find your own way
For the first time in your life
These are deeply troubled times
We suffer through a daily routine of lies, deception, and distress
Yes, of course, there is good in the world
But it suffocates underneath the knee of our collective malevolence
We all feel the heart-wrenching burden
Of all the unnecessary violence and trauma
And the unavoidable consequence
Of the human narrative
Forged in the raging fires of
Narcissism, inequity, and greed
While a pandemic
Pours gasoline over everyday life
Now is the time to turn away from it all
Not in a refusal to contribute to the greater good
But to participate more deeply in life
By looking in the other direction
Precisely where the distractions are
The ones you have ignored all these years
That only you can move toward
Not on some courageous journey to find meaning, purpose, or wisdom
But embrace humility and revel in the privilege of being alive
I don’t care if there is a true self
I don’t care about finding a vocation
I don’t care to listen to the banter of spiritual automatons
I don’t care who has the best fiction
I care about the mystery of being
Turn away
Now
And as you take that first trembling step
Into that feral terrain
Where your life is
Let those distractions
The ones that have remained faithful to you
Across all these years
Be a revelation
Of something sacred
That leads you back into yourself
And the mystery of your own disappearance
That has been promised
Passing By
You could see him in the distance. A familiar person dressed for warmth on a cold winter’s day. Walking the other way. The sky and your mind had been grey for days. But today is sunny. Blue sky. A gentle breeze. A radiant day for a walk.
He is closer now. Your pace does not slow. You prepare the usual bland niceties. But this time, something unexpected moves in you. And you hear a gentle whisper… Do not pass them by. But the routine exchange is already underway. Words said with mechanized precision. Good-natured and polite. But empty. And unconscious. Another mindless ritual. The whisper is already forgotten.
They are behind you now. And you can’t walk anymore. Another gentle whisper… Why didn’t you stop? You find yourself standing there on the road. You look back and he has already moved away. Out of reach.
You remain standing in the same place. He is further behind you now. Your heart leans into you with poignant feelings of loss. You see a few clouds passing by, and you notice that they have seen you. A cold January breeze touches you. More feelings of loss. Somehow, you feel the wound is necessary.
So, you start walking again now wondering why you feel so strange. Your steps are more tentative now. And uncertain. Your heart is heavier, but your mind is mercifully quiet. Something within refuses to leave you alone. And you say out loud… Why didn’t you stop?
As you turn and head toward your house in the distance, you are walking in a different way. A way that encourages openness to living rather than closure to life. A way that cultivates creative communion rather than routine contact. Moreover, a way in which life never passes you by.
You look up and hear the clouds chuckle as they follow the winds. They are moving on now. But riding on the winds, even they refused to pass you by. There was communion.
I’m closer to home now.
Your Broken Life
You have journeyed a long time and have reached the crossroads in life where you feel the pressure of having neither the time nor the ability to heal your broken life. Sometimes aging conjures the startling revelation that life did not go as you had hoped. That you did not live in the way you should have. That there is regret. And now, sinking into this liminal state, your body is tired and worn, your mind exhausted by the volatility of sustaining you, and your spirit never released from the confines of being you.
A broken life. Pieces and fragments of strenuous effort that never gathered themselves together. Everything exposed. Nothing is buried or hidden. Your life pulled here and there from one thing to the next to survive. Sometimes success and loss are the same things. Your creative spirit is exhausted by it all. Why didn’t you leave this? Why didn’t you trust in something greater than yourself? Too late now.
People look at you differently now that you are old. You see through the shimmering veneer of aging. Sixty is not the new forty. It’s nothing like forty. It’s harder, much harder. Time doesn’t move more quickly; you think it does. But it can pass you by if you’re not careful. You exist in a body that has endured sixty years of living. Stop pretending. There’s no youth to be found here. Everything about it feels different.
So here you sit. Writing things down. Trying to do something more than just exist. Immersing yourself in language. Trying to find a way. Inside a painful body. And exhausted mind. Watching your time run out. The contraction of life upon you. Taking you. Away.
From this place of physical deterioration and mental exhaustion, you gaze upon your broken life. You see pieces of too many puzzles that cannot be put together, except by fanciful narrative. And you know that pieces are missing too. You feel sadness. There is loss and grieving to be accommodated. These feelings will remain with you. Can you learn from them and live with them by your side? You are a puzzle that cannot be made. This is your beginning.
There is recovery, but it is not what you think. Your wounds are deep. They will not heal like a paper cut. Your wounds are not visible; they are felt. They move in you and around you while seducing your senses into despair. But your wounds do not seek to punish you. Perhaps despair is where you need to go before it is too late. Perhaps despair is a trusted advisor.
Here you sit betwixt and between, surveying the broken pieces of your past and the contraction of life ahead. There is far less time ahead of you than behind you now. The present moment, that bastion of the contemplative arts, is now a torrent of liminality. It’s all quite fragile. They forget to tell you that.
Can you heal your broken life? If by healing you mean striving to do some good in the world exactly where you are, then you might find some comfort. But if by healing you mean fixing and repairing your brokenness, then you will continue to suffer. You cannot heal the broken pieces of your life because they will not fit together. Some of the pieces you must confront are not of your own making. No magic will bring it all together again. Your life is broken and will stay that way—a harsh but genuine truth. There is only one question: Can you make yourself large enough to accommodate it?
Healing is about what can be done. If you feel despair about life, then you know life matters to you. That there is a sense of privilege in the magic of simply being here. If you didn’t care, there would be no despair. Place your attention on what can be done and ignore what cannot be changed. Honor your brokenness and give it home inside of you.
Remember, your task is not to try and put all the pieces together into a comfortable form. They won’t fit. It’s an expectation that wounds you. Your task is to accommodate your broken life, not repair it. Let all the pieces that haunt you remain where they are. They are yours to claim. They belong to you.
Sometimes healing is about doing nothing at all.
Your Own Voice
Trapped inside the frantic cacophony
Of modern life,
Plagued by harsh, jarring sounds
Of protest, outrage, and fear,
You unexpectedly discover
That the absence of your own voice,
The one that has yet to be heard,
Is a consequence of never allowing
Your vulnerabilities
To speak.
The acoustics of everyday life
Exhaust your sensibilities.
Voices of authority, consumption, and discord
Conspire to lead you back
To the same worries
Predictable anxieties
And fierce ruminations
That conspire to drown your awareness
In an angry sea of noise.
Now that you are growing old
And feel the seasonality of autumn
Moving deep within,
And the terrifying beauty
Of transience
Resonating everywhere in your body,
You start to hear
The call of your own voice
That has been waiting
All these years
Encouraging you to come back
To the wild terrain
That will inspire you
And bring you to your knees.
All the other voices
You have sounded
In your life
Are not your own.
They are the echoes of your anonymity,
Deserted and marooned
In the conditioned,
The predictable,
And a story that is not yours to tell
But thought you had to live.
And this:
When you are still
You can hear the tranquil descent of a single tear
Sliding down your cheek,
Finding its way back into the shadows
Of your buried life.
And it is here
On your knees,
After all these years
Sounding the sirens
Of misguided ambition,
You finally learn
That nothing can drown out
The haunting cry of your longing.
Now you walk toward it
Frightened, humbled, and determined
With no desire to retreat.
Even you can hear
In these words
The courageous voice
Of primal vulnerability
And the fragile utterings
Of a beginner
Fumbling around
In the noise,
Ignoring all the other voices
That have confused and mislead
And made you anonymous,
So that you can finally speak
From the solitary flame
Of your mystery.
And now,
As you try to say something for the first time
You can hear the utterings
Of a childlike voice.
You blush at its innocence
Smile at its foolishness
And celebrate its immaturity.
For the first time,
Deep inside the autumn of your life,
You finally come home
To the sound of your unknowing.
Notes
- Sometimes poetry takes the shape of giving yourself a good talking to. This about is about an uncomfortable sense of incongruity between what I was writing in my journal and how I was engaging with the world around me. The poem urges authenticity and genuine expression, which, for me, feels as though my body, and not my mind, that is doing the talking.
- This poem is inspired by the remarkable body of work created by David Whyte. In particular, Your Own Voice is my response to Start Close In, a poem by David Whyte that, for me, touches the essence of authenticity and the creative imagination.
- Listen to David Whyte reading Start Close In.
- A remarkable interview to watch is David Whyte: The Conversational Nature of Reality