Connect.

I haven’t much to say today, so I’m going to pull a Melissa and give you one of my favorite poems.

I first heard David Whyte on the carride home from my annual women’s meditation retreat perhaps 5 years ago. My friend, in her new and exciting Mini, maybe even with the top down, decided we were a little too altered at the moment to listen to music on the drive down the mountains of Napa, and so put in a CD of David Whyte. I’d never heard of him. Or his Irish accent. Or the way he repeats his own lines when he recites them, the way he pauses to savor and emphasize words. But, I did that day.

The next time I heard the poem recited, it was in the hospital, maybe a year and a half ago. The same friend brought a slightly battered, second-hand copy of the David Whyte book named for the poem. The nurse that day, with her Hawaiian flowerprint scrubs and her own Aussie accent, saw the gift exchange and exclaimed her own love of David Whyte. So I asked her to read this one aloud to us, and reluctantly, shyly, she assented. It was so still and lovely in that room then.

When you get a chance to hear him, do it. Till then, reading will suffice.

            Everything Is Waiting For You

            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.

            Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into

            the conversation.  The kettle is singing

            even as it pours you a drink, the cooking pots

            have left their arrogant aloofness and

            seen the good in you at last.  All the birds

            and creatures of the world are unutterably

            themselves.  Everything is waiting for you.

                    David Whyte. listen. (start at 1:19; so good!) read.