Sunday, May 2, 2021

the busy edge dissolves

 

 


 

The object in meditation and all of our contemplative disciplines is silence. But… 
that silence is in order for you to perceive something other than yourself — 
what you’ve arranged as yourself to actually perceive this frontier
 between what you call your self and what you call other than your self, 
whether that’s a person or a landscape.

One of the greatest arts of poetry is actually to create silence through attentive speech — 
speech that says something in such a way that it appears as a third frontier
 between you and the world, and invites you into a deeper and more generous
 sense of your own identity and the identity of the world… 
 
Poetry is the verbal art-form by which we can actually create silence.

Silence is frightening, an intimation of the end, the graveyard of fixed identities.
 Real silence puts any present understanding to shame; orphans us from certainty;
 leads us beyond the well-known and accepted reality and confronts us 
with the unknown and previously unacceptable conversation 
about to break in upon our lives.

In silence, essence speaks to us of essence itself
 and asks for a kind of unilateral disarmament, 
our own essential nature slowly emerging
 as the defended periphery atomizes and falls apart.
 
 As the busy edge dissolves we begin to join the conversation 
through the portal of a present unknowing, robust vulnerability, 
revealing in the way we listen, a different ear, a more perceptive eye, 
an imagination refusing to come too early to a conclusion, 
and belonging to a different person 
than the one who first entered the quiet.
 
 
 
 
 
 
~ David Whyte
from  Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning
of Everyday Words
 photo by Aaron Burden
with thanks to BrainPickings
 
 
 
 

1 comments:

Mystic Meandering said...

He says it so well... Love that beautiful photo!