David Whyte

A radical, "crystalline" (Elle) approach to integrating our work, relationships, and inner selves from the bestselling author, poet, and speaker. The author of Crossing the Unknown Sea and The Heart Aroused encourages readers to reimagine how they inhabit the worlds of love, work, and self-understanding. Whyte suggests that separating these "marriages" in order to balance them is to destroy the fabric of happiness itself. Drawing from his own struggles and the lives of some of the world's great writers and artists-from Dante to Jane Austen to Robert Louis Stevenson-Whyte explores the ways these core commitments are connected. Only by understanding the journey involved in each of the three marriages and the stages of their maturation, he says, can we understand how to bring them together in one fulfilled life.

Reimagining Work, Self and Relationship

The Three Marriages

Laura Mei

Life can find you only if you are paying real attention to something than your own concerns, if you can hear and see the essence of otherness in the world, if you can treat the world as if it is not just a backdrop to your own journey, if you can have a relationship with the world that isn’t based on triumphing 

it. Wordsworth tells us that we put ourselves at the center of the world strangely, by eliminating our concern for the smaller self. When something beautiful and overwhelming like a waterfall or the morning light on a mountainsides takes us outside our worries, we are put in a privileged position that is far more than the ability to appreciate a good view. Hearing and seeing without the filter of interpretation is seen by Wordsworth as the act of reaching the real conversation at least and it is this conversation that does all the work of helping us find our way into the future. Wordsworth is pointing out a marker for us, a milestone. Being smitten by a path, a direction, an intuited possibility, no matter the territory it crosses, we can feel in youth or at any threshold, as if life has found us at last.

Work is a constant conversation. It is the back and forth between what I think is me and what I think is not me; it is the edge between what the world needs of me and what I need of the world. Life the person to whom I am committed in a relationship, it is constantly changing and surprising me by its demands and needs but also by where it leads me, how much it teaches me, and especially, by how much tact, patience, and maturity is demands of me. Like marriage and relationship, work is a constant invisible question, sometimes nagging, sometimes cajoling, sometimes emboldening me; at its best beckoning me to follow a particular star to which I belong.

All of us encounter something when we are young that is almost like an invitation, a beckoning uncertainty that emboldens us not only into the world but also into a surer sense of ourselves. How we respond to an invitation can mark or maim us for the rest of our days. A life can often be measured against how sure we were in responding to the initial beckoning image. Our ability to follow our star is also a measure of our belief in the original invitation. There are some who feel afraid of what is on offer, afraid of something it calls for in their selves. As if they do not feel worthy of the invitation or feel at some essential level that they are not equal to that world into which they are being invited. What they glimpse seems too large for them and some part of them eventually becomes afraid of it. Making ourselves equal to the invitation offered by life often begins early on by walking out in the world, the head literally or metaphorically held high, looking and listening, cultivating a beautiful kind of youthful self-belief in our own senses.

The senses are constantly mediating the frontier between what we think is the self and what we think is other than our selves. First, we have eyes, mostly taken for granted. We have ears, not fully appreciated, with which to entertain a grand opera or a humble opinion, and we have those tireless hands used every day to pull others toward us or push them away; most especially we have a tongue with which to taste, to give voice to desires or to lash others with our pent-up disapproval. We also have the intellect to contrast and compare, to measure carefully and to weigh things in the balance. Then, beneath them all, untiring but seldom listened to, we have the sixth sense acknowledged in almost all traditions: a swirling internal formation called the intuition, the imagination, the heart, the almost prophetic part of a person that at its best somehow seems to know what is good and bad for us, but also what pattern is just about to precipitate, what out of a hundred possibilities is just about to happen, in a sense, an unspoken faculty for knowing what season we are in. What is about to die and what is about to come into being. We follow this constant internal season round of living and dying throughout our lives, trying to understand what it is we need, what is coming to fruition and what we need to let go of.

It doesn't interest me if there is one God or many gods. I want to know if you belong or feel abandoned. If you can know despair or can see it in others. I want to know if you are prepared to live in the world with its harsh need to change you. If you can look back with firm eyes saying this is where I stand. I want to know if you know how to melt into that fierce heat of living falling toward the center of your longing. I want to know if you are willing to live, day by day, with the consequence of love and the bitter unwanted passion of your sure defeat. I have been told, in that fierce embrace, even the gods speak of God.

from D.W., 𝘙𝘪𝘷𝘦𝘳 𝘍𝘭𝘰𝘸: 𝘕𝘦𝘸 & 𝘚𝘦𝘭𝘦𝘤𝘵𝘦𝘥 𝘗𝘰𝘦𝘮𝘴 1984-2007

The innocence of youth is necessary again and again through the thresholds of a life no matter our chronological age. Therefore, at any time of life, follow your own questions; don't mistake other people's questions for your own. Fall in love with your own questions so that you can commensurately be disappointed by them at a later date. See innocence not as something to be replaced by experience but as a necessary way, no matter your actual age, of paying attention, without which you cannot begin a new cycle of investigation. Fall in love with the possibilities ahead. At least to begin with, be infatuated with an imagined perfection. Let your hoped-for intuitions be true until they are proved wrong. What else will carry this pursuit of the Self, through all the other difficulties to come?

An ancient abiding dynamic of human existence is the ability of something, once fully admitted, to begin to change, and ro change quite often into its opposite. The Greeks called this 𝘦𝘯𝘢𝘯𝘵𝘪𝘢𝘥𝘳𝘰𝘮𝘪𝘢. The word names an underlying dynamic of time and space, that once a season has been recognized and announced, it is already beginning to leave and turn into the next. [Rilke] asks us to treat barriers not as things to be overcome but as representations of a bigger pattern whose shape we cannot as yet see. Not knowing what to do, we start to pay real attention. Just as people lost in the wilderness, on a cliff face or in a blizzard pay attention with a kind of acuity that they would not have if they thought they knew where they were. Why? Because for those who are really lost, their life depends on paying real attention. If you think you know where you are, you stop looking.

The motivational speakers and self-help books are all wrong: there is no way of creating a life where we are full participants one hundred percent of the time. There is no way of being fully human without at times bring fully stuck or even completely absent; we are simply not made that way. There is no possibility of pursuing a work without coming to terms with all the ways it is impossible to do it. Feeling far away from what we want tells us one of two things about our work: that we are at the beginning or that we have forgotten where we were going. Remembering what we have forgotten is a first practical step home; the opening of a tidal gate that brings us into contact with the larger, stronger currents of existence. Exile and forgetting are natural states for most human beings, but so are remembering and recalling. All tasks are completed through cycles of visitation and absence. It may in fact be, that the very essence of what individuals have to offer the world is through a close understanding of their weaknesses and blind spots — blind spots in themselves or in others.

Anxiety actually seems to keep an experience of the deeper self at bay. This hidden self seems reluctant to be listed, categorized, threatened or coerced. It lives beneath our surface tiredness, waiting, it seems, for us to stop. Stopping can be very, very difficult. It can take exhaustion, extreme circumstances, or an intimate sense of loss for it to happen. Even then we can neutralize and isolate the experience, dismissing it as illogical, pretending it didn't count, then turning back to our surface strengths and chattering away in a false language we have built around our successes. Success can be the greatest barrier to stopping, to quiet, to opening up the radically different form of conversation that is necessary for understanding this larger sense of the Self. Our very success can be the cause of a greater anxiety for further preservation of our success. Anxiety about our world, about ourselves; our constant need to compare and contrast ourselves and others, our constant attempt to identify exactly where on the map we find ourselves, divides us from creation. 

The Three Marriages quotes

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