Besieged

Besieged is how most people feel most of the time: by events, by people, by all the necessities of providing, parenting or participating and even by the creative possibilities they have set in motion themselves, and most especially, a success they have achieved through long years of endeavor.

As creatures we define ourselves through belonging or not belonging, we cannot help but make commitments to people, places and things, which then come looking for us.  Conscious or unconscious, we are surrounded not only by the vicissitudes of a difficult world but even more by those of our own making.

If the world will not go away then the great discipline seems to be the ability to make an identity that can live in the midst of everything without feeling beset.  Being besieged ask us to begin the day not with a to do list but a not to do list, a moment outside of the time-bound world in which it can be reordered and reprioritized.  In this space of undoing and silence we create a foundation from which to re-imagine our day and ourselves.  Beginning the daily conversation from a point of view of freedom and being untethered, allows us to re-see ourselves, to reenter the world as if for the first time.

We find that having people knock on our door is as much a privilege as it is a burden; that being seen, being recognized and being wanted by the world and having a place in which to receive everyone and everything, is infinitely preferable to its opposite.

-- from Consolations, by David Whyte p. 27-30

Courage

'Courage' comes from the Norman French, Coeur, or heart.

Courage is the measure of our heartfelt participation with life, with another, with a community, a work; a future.  To be courageous is not necessarily to go anywhere or do anything except to make conscious those things we already feel deeply and then to live the unending vulnerabilities of those consequences.

To be courageous is to seat our feelings deeply in the body and in the world: to live up to and into the necessities of relationships that often already exist, with things we find we already care deeply about: with a person, a future, a possibility in society, or with an unknown that begs us on and always has begged us on.  

To be courageous is to stay close to the way we are made.

-- from Consolations, by David Whyte p.39-40

Rest by David Whyte

Rest is the conversation between what we love to do and how we love to be.

To rest is to give up on worrying and fretting and the sense that there is something wrong with the world unless we are there to put it right; to rest is to fall back literally and figuratively from outer targets and shift the goal not to an inner static bull's eye, an imagined state of perfect stillness, but to an inner state of natural exchange.

We are rested when we let things alone and let ourselves alone, to do what we do best, breathe as the body intended us to breathe, to walk as we were meant to walk, to live with the rhythm of a house and a home, giving and taking through cooking and cleaning.  When we give and take in an easy foundational way we are closest to the authentic self, and closest to that self when we are most rested.

To rest is not self-indulgent, to rest is to prepare to give the best of ourselves, and to perhaps, most importantly, arrive at a place where we are able to understand what we have already been given.

In the first state of rest is the sense of stopping, of giving up on what we have been doing or how we have been being.

-- from Consolations, by David Whyte p. 181-182