heartbreak, loss, and letting go

 

 

 

 

Heartbreak begins the moment we are asked to let go but cannot, in other words, it colours and inhabits and magnifies each and every day; heartbreak is not a visitation, but a path that human beings follow through even the most average life. Heartbreak is an indication of our sincerity: in love relationship, in a life's work, in trying to learn a musical instrument, in the attempt to shape a better more generous self. Heartbreak is the beautifully helpless side of love and affection and is just as much an essence and emblem of care as the spiritual athlete's quick but abstract ability to let go. Heartbreak has its own way of inhabiting time and its own beautiful and trying patience in coming and going.

Heartbreak is how we mature; yet we use the word heartbreak as if it only occurs when things have gone wrong: an unrequited love, a shattered dream, a child lost before their time. Heartbreak, we hope, is something we hope we can avoid; something to guard against, a chasm to be carefully looked for and then walked around; the hope is to find a way to place our feet where the elemental forces of life will keep us in the manner to which we want to be accustomed and which will keep us from the losses that all other human beings have experienced without exception since the beginning of conscious time. But heartbreak may be the very essence of being human, of being on the journey from here to there, and of coming to care deeply for what we find along the way.

Our hope to circumvent heartbreak in adulthood is beautifully and ironically child-like; heartbreak is as inescapable and inevitable as breathing, a part and parcel of every path, asking its due in every sincere course an individual takes, it may be that there may be not only no real life without the raw revelation of heartbreak, but no single path we can take within a life that will allow us to escape without having that imaginative organ we call the heart broken by what it holds and then has to let go.

In a sobering physical sense, every heart does eventually break, as the precipitating reason for death or because the rest of the body has given up before it and can no longer sustain its steady beat, but hearts also break in an imaginative and psychological sense: there is almost no path a human being can follow that does not lead to heartbreak. A marriage, a committed vow to another, even in the most settled, loving relationship, will always break our hearts at one time or another; a successful marriage has often had its heart broken many times just in order for the couple to stay together; parenthood, no matter the sincerity of our love for a child, will always break the mold of our motherly or fatherly hopes, a good work seriously taken, will often take everything we have and still leave us wanting; and finally even the most self compassionate, self examination should, if we are sincere, lead eventually to existential disappointment.

Realizing its inescapable nature, we can see heartbreak not as the end of the road or the cessation of hope but as the close embrace of the essence of what we have wanted or are about to lose. It is the hidden DNA of our relationship with life, outlining outer forms even when we do not feel it by the intimate physical experience generated by it absence; it can also ground us truly in whatever grief we are experiencing, set us to planting a seed with what we have left or appreciate what we have built even as we stand in its ruins.

If heartbreak is inevitable and inescapable, it might be asking us to look for it and make friends with it, to see it as our constant and instructive companion, and perhaps, in the depth of its impact as well as in its hindsight, and even, its own reward. Heartbreak asks us not to look for an alternative path, because there is no alternative path. It is an introduction to what we love and have loved, an inescapable and often beautiful question, something and someone that has been with us all along, asking us to be ready for the ultimate letting go.





David Whyte

from Consolations: The Solace, 

Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words

 

 

 

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

 

 

 

 

vulnerability

Vulnerability is not a weakness, a passing indisposition 

or something we can arrange to do without, vulnerability is not a choice,

 vulnerability is the underlying, ever present and abiding undercurrent

 of our natural state. To run from vulnerability is to run from the essence

 of our nature, the attempt to be invulnerable is the vain attempt

 to become something we are not and most especially, to close off 

our understanding of the grief of others. More seriously,

 in refusing our vulnerability we refuse the help needed at every turn 

of our existence and immobilize the essential, tidal and conversational

 foundations of our identity.

To have a temporary, isolated sense of power over all events 

and circumstances, is a lovely illusionary privilege and perhaps 

the prime and most beautifully constructed conceit of being human 

and especially of being youthfully human, but it is a privilege

 that must be surrendered with that same youth, with ill health, 

with accident, with the loss of loved ones who do not share 

our untouchable powers; powers eventually and most emphatically

 given up, as we approach our last breath.

The only choice we have as we mature is how we inhabit our vulnerability,

 how we become larger and more courageous and more compassionate 

through our intimacy with disappearance, our choice is to inhabit vulnerability

 as generous citizens of loss, robustly and fully, or conversely, 

as misers and complainers, reluctant and fearful, always at the gates 

of existence, but never bravely and completely attempting to enter,

 never wanting to risk ourselves, never walking fully through the door.





~ David Whyte
from Consolations:The Solace, Nourishment and 
Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words

 

farewell letter

She wrote me a letter

after her death

and I remember

a kind of happy light

falling on the envelope

as I sat by the rose tree

on her old bench

at the back door,

so surprised by its arrival

wondering what she would say,

looking up before I could open it

and laughing to myself

in silent expectation.

Dear son, it is time

for me to leave you.

I am afraid that the words

you are used to hearing

are no longer mine to give,

they are gone and mingled

back in the world

where it is no longer

in my power

to be their first

original author

not their last loving bearer.

You can hear

motherly

words of affection now

only from your own mouth

and only

when you speak them

to those

who stand

motherless

before you.

As for me I must forsake

adulthood

and be bound gladly

to a new childhood.

You must understand

this apprenticeship

demands of me

an elemental innocence

from everything

I ever held in my hands. 

I know your generous soul

is well able to let me go

you will in the end

be happy to know

my God was true

and I find myself

after loving you all so long,

in the wide,

infinite mercy

of being mothered myself. 

P.S. All your intuitions are true.

~ David Whyte
photo by edward steichen

fallen in love

That day I saw beneath dark clouds

the passing light over the water

and I heard the voice of the world speak out,

I knew then, as I had before

life is no passing memory of what has been

nor the remaining pages in a great book

waiting to be read.

It is the opening of eyes long closed.

It is the vision of far off things

seen for the silence they hold.

It is the heart after years

of secret conversing

speaking out loud in the clear air.

It is Moses in the desert

fallen to his knees before the lit bush.

It is the man throwing away his shoes

as if to enter heaven

and finding himself astonished,

opened at last,

fallen in love with solid ground.

~ David Whyte

All my body calls

All my body calls

for something in this sleeping

earth

we call the spirit.

But how

from lifted arms

where stars run through fingers

and the night is like sand

do I breathe a fragrance of its wisdom

do I call its name

or listen to the drops

that trickle down to earth

and hear

life being given

not only through the moving hands of the forest

but through the hand that reaches in

the dark unmoving regions of the chest

and uncovers slowly

the enormous

indistinct

shape of the ocean.

~  David Whyte 

what is precious

.

.

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.




.
~ David Whyte
from the house of belonging
art by Klimt
thanks to  moment by moment

enough. these few words are enough.

Enough. These few words are enough.

If not these words, this breath.

If not this breath, this sitting here.

This opening to the life
we have refused
again and again
until now.

Until now


~ David Whyte