David Whyte Essentials Quotes

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 title and conversational foundations of our identity.

To want to run away is an essence of being human, it transforms any staying through the transfigurations of choice. To think about fleeing from circumstances, from a marriage, a relationship or from a work is part of the conversation itself and helps us understand the true distilled nature of our own reluctance. Strangely, we are perhaps most fully incarnated as humans, when part of us does not want to be here, or doesn’t know how to be here. Presence is only fully understood and realized through fully understanding our reluctance to show up. To understand the part of us that wants nothing to do with the full necessities of work, of relationship, of loss, of doing what is necessary, is to learn humility, to cultivate self-compassion and to sharpen that sense of humor essential to a merciful perspective of both a self and another.

To see the full miraculous essentiality of the color blue is to be grateful with no necessity for a word of thanks. To see fully, the beauty of a daughter's face is to be fully grateful without having to seek a God to thank him.

Human beings do not find their essence through fulfillment or eventual arrival but by staying close to the way they like to travel, to the way they hold the conversation between the ground on which they stand and the horizon to which they go. We are in effect, always close; always close to the ultimate secret: that we are more real in our simple wish to find a way than any destination we could reach: the step between not understanding that and understanding that, is as close as we get to happiness.

Through the radical undoing and debilitation of repeated pain we are reacquainted with the essentialities of place and time and existence itself; in deep pain we have energy only for what we can do wholeheartedly and then, only within a narrow range of motion, metaphorically or physically, from tying our shoelace to holding the essential core conversations that are reciprocal and reinforcing within the close-in circle of those we love. Pain teaches us a fine economy, in movement, in the heart’s affections, in what we ask of ourselves and eventually in what we ask in others.

To go beyond our normal identities and become closer than close is to lose our sense of self in temporary joy: a form of arrival that only opens us to deeper forms of intimacy that blur our fixed, controlling, surface identity.

Hiding is an act of freedom from the misunderstanding of others, especially in the enclosing world of oppressive secret government and private entities, attempting to name us, to anticipate us, to leave us with no place to hide and grow in ways unmanaged by a creeping necessity for absolute naming, absolute tracking and absolute control. Hiding is a bid for independence, from others, from mistaken ideas we have about ourselves, from an oppressive and mistaken wish to keep us completely safe, completely ministered to, and therefore completely managed. Hiding is creative, necessary and beautifully subversive of outside interference and control. Hiding leaves life to itself, to become more of itself. Hiding

THE JOURNEY There is every reason to despair due to all the present events that seem out of our control, but there is every reason to hope that with attention and discipline, we can bring ourselves and our societies, through a kind of necessary seasonal disappearance, back into the realm of choice. Firstly, the easy part: despair. The world at present seems to be a mirror to many of our worst qualities. We could not have our individual fears and prejudices, our wish to feel superior to others, and our deep desire not to be touched by the heartbreak and vulnerabilities that accompany every life, more finely drawn and better represented in the outer world than are presented to us now, by the iconic and often ugly political figures, encouraging the worst in their fellows that dominate our screens and our times. Life is fierce and difficult. There is no life we can live without being subject to grief, loss and heartbreak. Half of every conversation is mediated through disappearance. Thus, there is every reason to want to retreat from life, to carry torches that illuminate only our own view, to make enemies of life and of others, to hate what we cannot understand and to keep the world and the people who inhabit it at a distance through prejudicial naming; but therefore, it also follows, that our ability to do the opposite, to meet the other in the world on their own terms, without diminishing them, is one of the necessary signatures of human courage; and one we are being asked to write, above all our flaws and difficulties, across the heavens of this, our present time. The essence in other words of The Journey.

Ambition is natural to the first steps of youth, who must experience its essential falsity to know the larger reality that stands behind it, but held on to too long, and especially in eldership, it always comes to lack surprise, turns the last years of the ambitious into a second childhood, and makes the once successful into an object of pity.

Recall the way you are all possibilities you can see and how you live best as an appreciator of horizons whether you reach them or not.