Hiding

Hiding is one of the brilliant and virtuoso practices of almost every part of the natural world: the protective quiet of an icy northern landscape, the held bud of a future summer rose, the snowbound internal pulse of the hibernating bear.  Hiding is underestimated.  We are hidden by life in our mother's womb until we grow and ready ourselves for our first appearance in the lighted world....

What is real is almost always to begin with, hidden, and does not want to be understood by the part of our mind that mistakenly thinks it knows what is happening.  What is precious inside us does not care to be known by the mind in ways that diminish its presence.

Hiding is an act of freedom from the misunderstanding of others.  Hiding is a bid for independence, from others, from mistaken ideas we have about ourselves, from an oppressive and mistaken wish to keep us completely safe, completely ministered to, and therefore completely managed.

Hiding is creative, necessary and beautifully subversive of outside interference and control.  Hiding leaves life to itself, to become more of itself.  Hiding is the radical independence necessary for our emergence into the light of a proper human future.

-- from Consolations, by David Whyte p. 113-115

Help

Help is strangely, something we want to do without, as if the very idea disturbs and blurs the boundaries of our individual endeavors, as if we can not face how much we need in order to go on.  We are born with an absolute necessity for help, grow well only with a continuous succession of extended hands, and as adults depend upon others for our further successes and possibilities in life even as competent individuals.

[As adults] the need for help becomes more subtle, hidden as it is by the illusion that we are suddenly free agents able to survive on our own, the one corner of the universe able to supply its own answers.

To ask for help and to ask for the right kind of help and to feel that it is no less than our due as a live human being; to feel, in effect, that we deserve it, may be the engine of transformation itself.

-- from Consolations, by David Whyte p.107-110

Gratitude

Gratitude is not a passive response to something we have been given, gratitude arises from paying attention, from being awake in the presence of everything that lives within us and without us.  Gratitude is not necessarily something that is shown after the even, it is the deep, a priori state of attention that shows we understand and are equal to the gifted nature of life.

- from Consolations, by David Whyte p. 89