Some Whyte for Winter

A few days back, a Fire & Water participant shared an excerpt from a David Whyte poem (thx Juliet). The full poem is here.

I love many lines and images from this poem. In this, “…you can belong to everything simply by listening…”

Ah, there it is. The first act. A place to start.
Listening. Listening to self, to other, to circumstance.
Listening to season. Listening to breath.
Listening to the quiet that seems to hold us in an ever unfolding,
offering the next and the next and the next
for the now, and the next now, and the next now.

For inspiration, and with gratitude for David Whyte’s thoughtful ways.

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 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 have led me to that otherness.

So let this winter of listening
be enough
for the new life
I must call my own.