David Whyte

Clear Mind, Wild Heart

Maria

What an amazing listen. David Whyte has a way to make you feel like *everything* is okay, everything is part of the human experience. I'm so glad I discovered his words. My favorite passages:

"Poetry is about freedom. Not the freedom to be free from things. Freedom to be completely into the experience and therefore the possibility to change your perspective completely. Allow yourself be someone new in that discovery. Poetry is allowing yourself to say things you didn’t even know you knew."

"Poetry as a courageous act of articulating reality. Of articulating whatever step you find yourself in, and therefore emancipating yourself to the next step. Not being caught in one part of the cycle. The refusal to speak to your imprisonment condemns you to that walled off place for the rest of your existence. One part of you will constantly remain in some form of prison and will constantly compensate it in other actions for this inner lack of freedom."

"The way we could belong to the world is through exile. Human beings are such creatures of belonging that all you got to do is to be able to articulate all the ways that feel lonely, exile, don’t belong. If you say it clearly as the way you feel, you’re already on the way home. You’re already at the frontier to be taken back to the place that you’ve felt far from"

"Each of us has our way into life, and we should have faith in it, no matter how difficult or awkward our confrontation with reality. Our best hope is we never know why we’re made the way we are, and the rewards that come from faith in that particular way of being, that is just utterly and unashamedly ourselves."

"One of the great qualities that’s necessary for human being besides a generous and attentive heart and mind is a sense of self compassion for the way you’re made in particular, and you wouldn’t lose faith no matter what from your own difficulties and awkwardnesses. And that some of the way that you’re awkward in the world is necessary to your final confrontation with existence. You couldn’t get there without being bewreathed by certain ways. And those failings are actually a core part of our experience of the luminous."

"The essence of the ability to feel the fiercer edges of experience is we're able to fully incarnate our life at any one time. The edges of our existence is the edges that are ripening from our experience, and allow us to taste the ripening of our experiences at any one time. thereby, celebrate and understand the particular season that we're experiencing at any one moment. any attempt we do to occupy a bland moment is like fruits in basket that are not ripe, doesn't have the taste of ripe fruit.

"Life calls for a certain kind of vulnerability and participation. Human beings must exhibit faith in the way that they're made. Our identity is not based on our perceived opinions or beliefs but based on the depth of attention we pay to the world around us, to the conversations other than us."

"Our true nature comes to the fore through paying profound attention because no one else can look at the world, can interpret the world, can love the world in the way that you can. Your recipe for attention is different from everyone else’s, we have commonalities that help us empathize but our corner in the world is something we must incarnate fully because there's no one else who can live out that place in our stead. And that is our task, to live in that place. Through doing that, we can be generous to others, how we can understand how astonishingly difficult it is for any human being to take a step at all, to be courageous in a world where we have to be lonely and together at the same time."

Clear Mind, Wild Heart

Reviews