“The birds they sang, at the break of day,
Start again I heard them say,
Don’t dwell on what has passed away, or what is yet to be
The wars they will be fought again.
The Holy Dove, she will be caught again.
Bought and sold, and bought again, the dove is never free
Ring the bells that still can ring. Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.
You can add up the parts, but you won’t have the sum.
You can strike up the march, but there is no drum.
Every heart, every heart, to Love will come—but like a refugee.”
—Leonard Cohen, Anthem

“It doesn’t interest me if there is one God or many gods
I want to know if you belong or feel
abandoned.
If you know despair or can see it in others.
I want to know if you are prepared to live in the world
With its harsh need to change you.
If you can look back with firm eyes
Saying this is where I stand. I want to know if you know
How to melt into that fierce heat of ­living
Falling toward the center of your ­longing.
I want to know if you are willing to live,
Day by day, with the consequence of love
And the bitter unwanted passion of your sure defeat.
I have heard, in that fierce embrace, even the gods speak of God.”
—David Whyte, Self-Portrait

“My face catches the wind off the snow line
And flushes with a flush that will never fully settle well
That was a metropolitan vanity wanting to look young forever to pass
I was never a rafellite beauty
And only pretty enough to be seen with men that wanted to be seen with passable women
But now I am in love with a place that does not care how I look Or if I am happy
Happy is how I look. And that’s all.
My hair will grow gray, my nails chip and flake
My waist thicker and the years work all their usual changes
If my face is to be weather beaten as well
It’s little enough loss for a year among lakes and hills
Where simply to look out my window at the high pass
Makes me indifferent to mirrors and to what my soul may wear over its new complexion.”
—Blair Adcock, Weathering

Two miles I had to walk along the field before I reached my home
Magnificent the morning was, a memorable one, more glorious than I’d ever beheld
The seas were laughing in the distance
All the solid mountains were as bright as clouds, tinted, drenched in imperial light
While in the meadow and the lower grounds lay all the sweetness of a common dawn
With dews, vapors and the melody of birds and laborers going forth into
the fields
Ah dear friend, need I say but to the
brim my heart was full.
I made no vows but vows were made
for me
One unknown to me was given that
I should be else
Singing greatly dedicated spirit
And on I walked in blessedness which even yet remains.
—William Woodsworth

“Revelations must be terrible with no time left to say goodbye
Imagine that moment, starring at the still waters, with only the brief tremor of your body to say you are leaving everything and everyone you know behind.
Being far from home is hard but you know at least we are all exiled together.
When you open your eyes to the world, you are on your own for the first time
No one is even interested in saving you now
And the world steps in to test the calm
fluidity of your body.
From moment to moment as if it believed you could join its vibrant dance of fire and calmness and final stillness
As if you were meant to be exactly where you are
As if like the dark branch of a desert river you could flow on without a speck of guilt and everything, everywhere would still be just as it should be.
As if your place in the world mattered and the world could neither speak or hear the fullness of its own bitter and beautiful cry without the deep well of your body resonating in the echo.
Knowing that it takes only that first terrible word to make this circle complete
Revelation must be terrible knowing you can never hide your voice again.”
—David Whyte,

Revelations must be terrible

“To laugh often and much;
to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children;
to earn the appreciation of honest
critics and endure the betrayal
of false friends;
to appreciate beauty, to find the best
in others,
to leave the world a little bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch or a redeemed social condition;
to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived.
This is to have succeeded.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Success

“Above the mountains the geese fly
into the light again
Painting their black silhouettes on an open sky
Sometimes everything has to be inscribed across the heavens
To find the one line already written inside you.
Sometimes it takes a great sky to find the first bright
and indescribable wedge of freedom in your own heart
Sometimes the bones of the black sticks left when the fire’s gone out
When someone has written something new in the ashes of your life
You are not leaving, you are arriving.”
—David Whyte, The Journey

I will end with my current favorite poem:

In monastery darkness by the light of one flashlight
The old shrine room waits in silence.
While above the door we see the terrible figure,
Fierce eyes demanding, “Will you step through?”
And the old monk leads us, bend back nudging blackness
Prayer beads in the hands that beckons, we light the butter lamps and bow,
Eyes blinking in the pungent smoke, looking up without a word,
See faces in meditation, a hundred faces carved above, eye lines wrinkled in the hand held light. Such love in solid wood!
Taken from the hillsides and carved in silence
They have the vibrant stillness of those who made them.
Engulfed by the past they have been neglected, but through
Smoke and darkness they are like the flowers
We have seen growing through the dust of eroded slopes,
Their slowly opening faces turned toward the mountain.
Carved in devotion their eyes have
softened through age
And their mouths curve through delight of the carver’s hand.
If only our own faces would allow the invisible carver’s hand
To bring the deep grain of love to the
surface.
If only we knew as the carver knew,
how the flaws
In the wood led his searching chisel to the very core,
We would smile too and not need faces immobilized by fear and the weight
of things undone. When we fight
with our failing we ignore the entrance to the shrine itself
And wrestle with the guardian, fierce
figure on the side of good.
And as we fight our eyes are hooded
with grief  and our mouths are dry with pain.
If only we could give ourselves to the blows of the carver’s hands,
The lines in our faces would be the
trace lines of rivers feeding the sea
Where voices meet, praising the
features of the mountain and the cloud and the sky.
Our faces would fall away until we,
Growing younger toward death every day, would gather all our flaws in
celebration
To merge with them perfectly, impossibly, Wedded to our essence, full of silence from the carver’s hands.
—David Whyte,
The Faces at Braga

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