Sticking Around

By David Whyte

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.

I started reading David Whyte’s Consolations in June last year, when I badly needed what the book’s subtitle offered: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words. I was in despair, to put it mildly, and so I read his essay on despair:

Despair is a difficult, beautiful necessary, a binding understanding between human beings caught in a fierce and difficult world where half of our experience is mediated by loss, but it is a season, a waveform passing through the body, not a prison surrounding us.

Six months later, as another year begins, I am now rereading his book. That season of despair has passed. His essays, like his poems, continue to give me space and light to find a way out of my prison.

In Consolations, Whyte lets me find my way out by finding my way back in. He leads me back into the conversation about what it truly means to be human. He gives me back the gifts borne by such words as joy, maturity, robustness, and solace. But he also encourages me to face life’s difficult, beautiful necessaries. He describes difficult feelings or states of being (alone, besieged, disappointment, heartbreak, longing, vulnerability) as unpreventable, inescapable, natural, beyond our control.

Vulnerability, he says, “is not a choice. Vulnerability is the underlying, ever-present and abiding undercurrent of our natural state.” How we choose to live with vulnerability is how we carry the conversation, how we carry ourselves. On courage, he writes: “every real conversation of life involves having our hearts broken.” And “there is no sincere path we can follow where we will not be fully and immeasurably let down and brought to earth ....”

By conversation, by sincere path, he means engagement, presence, both tension and mediation, an in-betweenness. It is a willingness to stay where things aren’t fixed, where outcomes aren’t guaranteed. To him, every real conversation is a decision to reach out and reach in, to find connections or lose them. In words and the gaps between them, or the gaps created by them, a real conversation can carry broken threads. And broken hearts.

To converse is to bear witness to the brokenness and to hold space for the possibility of healing. And for the possibility of staying broken and sticking around in spite of—or maybe because of—questions unanswered, loves unrequited.

To converse. The verb traces its origins to Latin, Old French, and late Middle English: to “keep company (with),” to “live among,” to “be familiar with.” Whyte keeps repeating and reinvigorating the word “conversation” in poems, essays, interviews, and podcasts. He is reclaiming this and other words from their banal ties and barren associations. In a world where words are often misused, overused, or devalued, every real conversation is becoming more and more rare and necessary.

David Whyte

“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.”

— Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words (Canongate Books, 2014)

from The Bell and the Blackbird: Poems by David Whyte (Many Rivers Press, 2018)

BLESSING FOR SOUND

I thank you, for the smallest sound, for the way my ears open even before my eyes, as if to remember the way everything began with an original, vibrant, note, and I thank you for this everyday original music, always being rehearsed, always being played, always being remembered as something new and arriving, a tram line below in the city street, gull cries, or a ship’s horn in the distant harbour, so that in waking I hear voices even where there is no voice and invitations where there is no invitation so that I can wake with you by the ocean, in summer or in the deepest seemingly quietest winter, and be with you so that I can hear you even with my eyes closed, even with my heart closed, even before I fully wake.

BLESSING FOR THE LIGHT

by David Whyte

After Derek Mahon

Your great mistake is to act the drama as if you were alone. As if life were a progressive and cunning crime with no witness to the tiny hidden transgressions. To feel abandoned is to deny the intimacy of your surroundings. Surely, even you, at times, have felt the grand array; the swelling presence, and the chorus, crowding out your solo voice. You must note the way the soap dish enables you, or the window latch grants you freedom. Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity. The stairs are your mentor of things to come, the doors have always been there to frighten you and invite you, and the tiny speaker in the phone is your dream-ladder to divinity.

by David Whyte

I awoke this morning in the gold light turning this way and that

thinking for a moment it was one day like any other.

But the veil had gone from my darkened heart and I thought

it must have been the quiet candlelight that filled my room,

it must have been the first easy rhythm with which I breathed myself to sleep,

it must have been the prayer I said speaking to the otherness of the night.

And I thought this is the good day you could meet your love,

this is the gray day someone close to you could die.

This is the day you realize how easily the thread is broken between this world and the next

and I found myself sitting up in the quiet pathway of light,

the tawny close grained cedar burning round me like fire and all the angels of this housely heaven ascending through the first roof of light the sun has made.

This is the bright home in which I live, this is where I ask my friends to come, this is where I want to love all the things it has taken me so long to learn to love.

This is the temple of my adult aloneness and I belong to that aloneness as I belong to my life.

What to Remember When Waking

In that first hardly noticed moment in which you wake, coming back to this life from the other more secret, moveable and frighteningly honest world where everything began, there is a small opening into the new day which closes the moment you begin your plans.

What you can plan is too small for you to live. What you can live wholeheartedly will make plans enough for the vitality hidden in your sleep.

To be human is to become visible while carrying what is hidden as a gift to others. To remember the other world in this world is to live in your true inheritance.

You are not a troubled guest on this earth, you are not an accident amidst other accidents you were invited from another and greater night than the one from which you have just emerged.

Now, looking through the slanting light of the morning window toward the mountain presence of everything that can be what urgency calls you to your one love? What shape waits in the seed of you to grow and spread its branches against a future sky?

Is it waiting in the fertile sea? In the trees beyond the house? In the life you can imagine for yourself? In the open and lovely white page on the writing desk?

— David Whyte

[This is the full text of David Whyte’s essay from Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words (Canongate Books, 2014).]

UNREQUITED

love is the love human beings experience most of the time. The very need to be fully requited may be to turn from the possibilities of love itself. Men and women have always had difficulty with the way a love returned hardly ever resembles a love given, but unrequited love may be the form that love mostly takes; for what affection is ever returned over time in the same measure or quality with which it is given? Every man or woman loves differently and uniquely, and each of us holds different dreams and hopes and falls in love or is the object of love at a very specific threshold in a very particular life where very, very particular qualities are needed for the next few years of our existence. What other human being could ever love us as we need to be loved? And whom could we know so well and so intimately through all the twists and turns of a given life that we could show them exactly the continuous and appropriate form of affection they need?

Requited love may happen, but it is a beautiful temporary, a seasonal blessing, the aligning of stars not too often in the same quarter of the heavens, an astonishing blessing. But it is a harvest coming only once every long cycle, and a burden to the mind and the imagination when we set that dynamic as the state to which we must always return in order to feel ourselves in a true, consistent, loving relationship.

Whether our affections are caught in romantic love, trying to see our neighbours as ourselves, or trying to love a great but distant God, our love rarely seems to be returned in the mode that it is given. That gift is returned in ways that, to begin with, we rarely recognise. Human beings live in disappointment and a self-appointed imprisonment when they refuse to love unless they are loved the selfsame way in return. It is the burden of marriage, the difficult invitation at the heart of parenting and the central difficulty in our relationship with any imagined, living future. The great discipline seems to be to give up wanting to control the manner in which we are requited, and to forgo the natural disappointment that flows from expecting an exact and measured reciprocation, from a partner, from a child, from our hopes for a loving God.

Opening the pages of Mary Randlett Landscapes, I find something in me opening up as well. I feel more space in which to breathe. I take a little more time to linger. I hold this book of black-and-white nature photographs, and I am drawn deep into this oasis of silence. Beneath the surface of paper, beyond the frame of generous white space, every image flows and glistens.

Water falling, freezing, or reflecting trees. An island afloat a garland of half-submerged rocks. A bird perched on a post rising from a mist-shrouded river. Sheep in grass. Swan on ice. Sandbars and tidelines and cloudforms. Mountains and moon. Fragments of time and motion kept still on the page but ever-moving on my mind.

I want to keep them all, Randlett’s ripples and rocks, every curl and wisp of cloud in her photographs, the drift of coastal fog, the gravity and texture of fallen log, a folded leaf in autumn, each crevice, silhouette, cliff, and wing. I never want to lose their sight, their solace. But I hold this book as I have held other books before, knowing it is enough to have sat still and breached the surface if only for a few moments.

After all, there’s really nothing to hold on to and so there is nothing to lose. This 2007 collection of Randlett’s work gathers images of beauty that is both timeless and time-bound. They are made more beautiful by the knowledge that someone took the time to see them and share the sight of them before they are gone. After all, ripples disappear. Clouds wisp away. Fog lifts. Leaves rot.

But for now I have these images to behold. And maybe, some other day, a few more lines to write—about the things worth seeing and keeping. Like Randlett, I feel blessed and most thankful for this gift of seeing. In my life, on this blog and elsewhere, I have always been looking at pictures, reading and listening, watching and writing. What a privilege, such a joy, it is to be so engaged and so enriched.

Mary Randlett (1924–2019)

“American novelist Henry James, asked what kind of man he would like to be, responded, ‘I would like to be the kind of man on whom nothing is lost.’ In the proper, educated, encyclopedic, sophisticated world of Henry James, to be aware of everything hinted at hair-splitting differences, infinitesimal shadings of color, or tiny degrees of moral consciousness. When considering today the kind of person ‘on whom nothing is lost,’ I am struck by something far more vigorous: a person who can entertain simultaneous points of view. A person who can identify big concepts and small details. A person with tremendous generosity of spirit and a willingness to let people and places exist for whom and what they are. A person with the ability not to assert herself conceptually or graphically onto the physical world before quietly and attentively observing all the variants, old and new, and how they intermingle and mesh. Mary Randlett is the kind of person on whom very little is lost.”

— Ted D’Arms, from his introduction to Mary Randlett Landscapes (University of Washington Press, 2007)

“I was happy as can be, all alone, searching, finding that beautiful light and then seeing what forms emerged—and the backgrounds of subtle form—bare trees—happy, happy.”

Words and photograph by Mary Randlett

“When an image appears as I saw it, it sends chills rippling up and down my spine, and . . . when there is more that I saw within an image I simply thank that Superior Being—God, Nature, whoever—for the gift. I don't question anything—I feel simply blessed—and most thankful—to have been given this gift.”

Words and photograph by Mary Randlett

“Yes, true story: even I have learned to live with what sometimes feels like endless snowfall.”

— D. B. Abacahin

[I wrote this little memory piece on Christmas Eve ten years ago. Obviously, the world has changed a lot since 2012. My ways of looking at this world have changed, too. But some things remain bittersweetly the same. So here I am again revisiting places in my mind, memories in this blog. Here’s a slightly revised version of that piece for these changed and changing times.]

Edward Scissorhands will always be my Christmas movie, my winter’s tale. It begins on a snowy evening with a little girl being put to bed by her grandmother. She asks, “Why is it snowing, Grandma? Where does it come from?” And the old woman tells her the story of how a strange, lonely creature continues to do his thing—making the most of his solitude by creating ice sculptures, letting the crystal shavings fly out the windows of his castle, showering the world with magic that eventually melts.

But I’m telling this tale the wrong way. I’m loading it with my usual baggage. Loneliness, solitude, impermanence, hmm . . . Let me put it this way instead. Once there was a great inventor who lived alone in a castle on top of a mountain. His grandest design would have been a human being to stand tall among his cookie-cutters, his other gadgets and gizmos. Two hands (you know, those things with fingers, palms, and wrists) would have been his Christmas gifts to Edward, his work in progress. Sadly, before Edward is completed, his maker dies. From then on, the poor unfinished creation has to fend for himself, with crucial parts missing. He is stuck with scissorhands, which can create art and inflict pain.

Nah. That’s not it, either. Director Tim Burton and screenwriter Caroline Thompson would stab me with scissors (or pins or icepicks or whatever comes in handy) to deflate all this so-full-of-myself babble. The truth is, I’m so full of fond memories of this film. Memories of the kind Avon lady (Dianne Wiest) rescuing Edward (Johnny Depp) from that dark castle and taking him home to her family and her neighborhood of gossipy wives and bored husbands. Memories of Edward as a Goth-inspired Charlie Chaplinesque man-child, landscape gardener, hairstylist, sex object, TV celebrity, and town scapegoat. Memories of him as the ultimate Rorschach inkblot test—a blank screen onto which a whole town can project its hopes and fears, ambiguities and contradictions. He’s pure innocence and/or a double-edged sword. He’s a Christ figure and/or the scourge of Satan. He’s Frankenstein’s monster and/or a portrait of the artist as an ageless semi-human.

I’m fond of that scene in which Kim (Winona Ryder), the Avon lady’s teenage daughter, takes a break from decorating the Christmas tree and goes out into the yard to find Edward high up on a ladder, sculpting a huge ice angel. She is thrilled to look up, her arms lifted and palms open to the falling swirls and specks of ice shavings. She dances under this momentary fountain. In Danny Elfman’s glorious music, I hear a chorus of lost souls lamenting all the things that are fleeting. But I also let some of the rapture overflow into my head. Until, as in Edward’s case, it’s time to run back to the dark castle, where I can continue to do my thing—chiseling my way through the cold, hard truths.

Like Edward, we all just want to be loved despite our bad-hair days, our ugly scars, and these hands that can both caress and cut. “You can’t touch anything without destroying it,” Kim’s jealous boyfriend (Anthony Michael Hall) snarls at Edward. Sounds like nature accusing us humans. Or like any self-blaming person looking in the mirror. Like Edward, we sometimes feel like parts of us are missing—we’re incomplete. We yearn for things we never had. Or we’re nostalgic for parts of us we used to have. I know these are not exactly the kind of Christmas sentiments we need right now. I really have to find a better way of telling this story. Or maybe sometimes there is no story to tell. Snow falls, ice melts, the world spins. Time passes, that’s all.

Meanwhile, I think of Edward up there alone. I imagine him still alive, snipping away at chunks of ice to perfect his sculptures or trimming leaves and twigs to shape his topiaries. It’s enough to make me want to open my arms and hold out my hands for remains of ice. Yes, true story: even I have learned to live with what sometimes feels like endless snowfall. As Grandma says in the end, “Sometimes you can still catch me dancing in it.”

"The search is the meaning, the search for beauty, love, kindness and restoration in this difficult, wired and often alien modern world. The miracle is that we are here, that no matter how undone we've been the night before, we wake up every morning and are still here. It is phenomenal just to be."

— Anne Lamott, Stitches: A Handbook on Meaning, Hope and Repair

_______

Anne Lamott gives me what I need on another morning like this when I don't feel like getting up again. When my life seems fine and bearable and I am not feeling sick or down in any specific, urgent way and yet I don't feel like starting yet another day. What next? What for? What if? All the old crazy questions. The moment reeks of everything I thought I had already put aside or gotten over.

Too old now, too wise and too tired to be caught up in desperation or even despair. I'm just lying down here for a while, not thinking much of where I was before this moment or where I'll go from here. No need for whys and hows for now. I’ve made it this far in this world, with this mind, in this body, having stitched together a life, this life.

It's corny and it sounds borderline smug, but here's the thing: I don't have much now, but I have contentment—or at least a bit of an awareness of it sometimes. I’m content knowing I am neither desperate nor in despair. I’m content knowing I don't have to know all the answers. I don’t have to win all the arguments. I don't need to fix everything or everyone that's broken. I don't have to recover all that's gone, all my losses. I don't have to, because I can't.

In an interview (“How to Live When You’re in Pain,” The Atlantic, November 9, 2021), the doctor and author BJ Miller said: “Happiness is not so much just the pursuit of pleasure. It’s somehow the pursuit of being okay with reality.” I’ve been thinking a lot about that lately. My version of happiness, or maybe some defiant variant of pragmatic, non-passive contentment, seems to have aligned with what Dr. Miller calls “decentralizing your ego”:

You can start decentralizing your ego; you can start seeing life outside of yourself and feeling your connection to it and appreciation for it and your responsibility to it. So in my field [hospice and palliative care], we talk about the end of life—like that’s the phrase, end of life—but it’s such a problematic phrase. Now life, life will keep going. Your life is going to end; my life’s going to end. This life will end. So it’s not the end of life. Life does not end, as far as we can tell it. It keeps on going. We—you or I—do not. So it’s the end of my life. Once you get over yourself, there is a sort of immortality happening, too, all around us.

So, it’s not all about me, my losses, my gains, all my years of searching what this all means and how it’s all going to end. It’s more like how I can finally get over myself. Which comes maybe at certain moments of the day, minutes of waking up in the middle of the night or in that space between inhales and exhales as I do one of my much-cherished early-morning long walks. I feel like I’m getting closer to getting over myself when I realize, well, yeah, some wounds never heal, some closures never close and some dreams do not deliver, and I’m okay with all that. The past is past; I can only revisit but not redo or undo it.

In 1990, at age 19, BJ Miller almost died in an accident. He was electrocuted; both his legs and half of his left arm had to be amputated. I was also 19 when I almost got it all over with. No more pleasure and no more pain, that would have been the plan. But fortunately some plans do not deliver, either.

A few days ago—November 18, 2022—was sort of a milestone for me. It marked the passage of 40 years. It was 40 years ago when I needed the world to stop. I tried, but I couldn't make it stop. Maybe some part of me ended then, but the rest of me lived on. How did I ever manage to stick around for as long as I have?

In 1982, I was 19. College senior. Lit major. Done with my last class (Philosophy of Religion) that chilly November afternoon. No autumn in this country. Nothing foreboding or piercing like winter. But the wind that day was relentlessly tearing leaves from trees, tossing and whipping them around where I walked.

And I walked out of that classroom, into the corridors, into and out of the library, and out on the streets of scattered leaves and deepening cracks, feeling like I had to go on walking until I could no longer see any reason or feel any compulsion to keep on walking. Until finally I went home and put myself to sleep when it was hours and hours away from bedtime.

Hours and hours later, I woke up in a hospital. Much later, I was back in the house, hooked up to an IV, vomiting and defecating and feeling depleted. Lying in bed, I turned to one side and saw the TV was on. It was a lively dance number, bodies moving in sync, swinging, jerking, being tossed and twirled, but the sound had been muted. I closed my eyes. Somehow I managed to put myself back to sleep. But no, the world did not stop.

That was 40 years ago, when I was 19 and the world went on. It went on and on and on until I could no longer bear the thought that I would have to be dragged along for a ride that wasn't going anywhere I wanted to, a ride that to me had lasted long enough.

But ride on I did. And still do. Sometimes it feels like a never-ending rollercoaster, and I feel like those leaves that November afternoon 40 years ago, when the wind tossed them, when they broke free and soared and fell. But sometimes it feels like what it is—just a ride. James Taylor beautifully sings about it in "Secret o' Life," that it's just a lovely ride and that it, too, will end: "Nobody knows how we got to the top of the hill. But since we're on our way down, we might as well enjoy the ride."

The song says the secret of life is enjoying the passage of time. Did I enjoy the passage of those 40 years? Am I enjoying the passage of time now as I type these words knowing that all these words can do is delay the moment I officially start another day with all its ups and downs and flatlines, its roundabouts and routines and a few (maybe pleasant) surprises? 40 years at 59. What do those 40 years look like from my 59-year-old view? How will they feel as more years pile up and slide down? Why do I even bother asking?