“‘Sometimes’: Poet and Philosopher David Whyte’s Stunning Meditation on Walking into the Questions of Our Becoming”

“‘Sometimes’: Poet and Philosopher David Whyte’s 

Stunning Meditation on Walking into the Questions of Our Becoming”

by Maria Popova

“The role of the artist, James Baldwin believed, is “to make you realize the doom and glory of knowing who you are and what you are.” This, too, is the role of the forest, it occurs to me as I walk the ferned, mossed woods daily to lose my self and find myself between the trees; to “live the questions,” in Rilke’s lovely phrase – to let the rustling of the leaves beckon forth the stirrings and murmurings on the edge of the psyche, which we so often brush away in order to go on being the smaller version of ourselves we have grown accustomed to being out of the unfaced fear that the grandeur of life, the grandeur of our own untrammeled nature, might require of us more than we are ready to give.

Those disquieting, transformative stirrings are what the poet and philosopher David Whyte explores with surefooted subtlety in his poem “Sometimes,” found in his altogether life-enlarging collection “Everything Is Waiting for You” (public library) and read here by the poet himself as part of a wonderful short course of poem-driven practices for neuroscientist and philosopher Sam Harris’s “Waking Up” meditation toolkit (which I can’t recommend enough and which operates under an inspired, honorable model of granting free subscriptions to those who need this invaluable mental health aid but don’t have the means).

“Sometimes”

“Sometimes

if you move carefully

through the forest,

breathing

like the ones

in the old stories,

who could cross

a shimmering bed of leaves

without a sound,

you come to a place

whose only task

is to trouble you

with tiny

but frightening requests,

conceived out of nowhere

but in this place

beginning to lead everywhere.

Requests to stop what

you are doing right now,

and

to stop what you

are becoming

while you do it,

questions

that can make

or unmake

a life,

questions

that have patiently

waited for you,

questions

that have no right

to go away.”

- David Whyte

Complement with Whyte on anger, forgiveness, and what maturity really means, hardship as the ground for self-expansion, and his lovely letter to children about reading as a portal to self-discovery, then revisit other great poets bringing their own versed wisdom to life: Marie Howe reading “Singularity,” Marissa Davis reading her own “Singularity” in response to Howe’s, Jane Hirshfield reading “Today, Another Universe,” Ross Gay reading “Ode to Buttoning and Unbuttoning My Shirt,” Marilyn Nelson reading “The Children’s Moon,” and former U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith reading from “My God, It’s Full of Stars.”

- https://mailchi.mp/brainpickings/