A lyrical bridge between past, present and future | David Whyte

David Whyte: Preserving the Soul (excerpt) - Thinking Allowed with Dr. J...

Irish hills, folk music and David Whyte’s poetry form a fleeting, meditative moment (A Psyche Film)

  

‘I thank you … for the way my ears open even before my eyes, as if to remember the way everything began with an original, vibrant note.’

You could easily mistake David Whyte’s ‘Blessing’ poems for prayers. His words marvel at everyday sublimity and express gratitude to some unseen ‘you’. But scrutinise his words and you’ll find language that, while steeped in his Irish-Catholic upbringing, doesn’t express a creed. Rather, it conveys what he refers to as ‘the conversational nature of reality’ – a sense that there’s a distinct intimacy and presence beyond oneself in each fleeting moment, if you’re willing to contemplate it. His ‘you’ is ubiquitous – no leap of faith required.

If these ‘conversations’ are often drowned out by daily distractions and planning, the US-based filmmaker Andrew Hinton builds a scene where they cry out for attention in this short film, which adapts two of Whyte’s ‘Blessing’ poems – ‘Blessing for Sound’ and ‘Blessing for the Light’. Whyte, born in England to an Irish mother, possesses what he calls a ‘movable frontier’ of an accent, which here errs towards his setting – an Irish landscape of rolling green hills, barren trees and unswimmable oceans tugged by fierce winds. The only human presence is Whyte and the stone walls carving up the countryside.

‘The art of blessing, the art of calling in the invisible help of the divine, is ever present to the Celtic mind,’ writes the musician and composer Owen Ó Súilleabháin in Emergence Magazine, reflecting on his score for the short film. It incorporates one of the oldest recordings of traditional Irish music in existence – a 1905 wax cylinder recording of a song called ‘Cé Phort Láirge’ (Waterford Quay). You needn’t understand the words to know that it’s a mournful cry, captured on a fragile medium.

These three elements – words, music and landscape – bring Whyte’s philosophy into vivid form, collapsing past and present, and interior and exterior worlds, into a moment. The result is a work that offers a fleeting invitation to, in Whyte’s words, ‘[stand] in the ground of your life fully’.

 

Director: Andrew Hinton

Producer: Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee

Poet: David Whyte

Musician and Composer: Owen Ó Súilleabháin

Blessings | Psyche Films

 

The future must enter you long before it happens

 

(Rainer Maria Rilke)

-      

On Gratitude (by David Whyte)

  

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 and without us. Gratitude is not necessarily something that is shown after the event, it is the deep, a priori state of attention that shows we understand and are equal to the gifted nature of life.

 

Gratitude is the understanding that many millions of things come together and live together and mesh together and breathe together in order for us to take even one more breath of air, that the underlying gift of life and incarnation as a living, participating human being is a privilege; that we are miraculously part of something, rather than nothing. Even if that something is temporarily pain or despair, we inhabit a living world, with real faces, real voices, laughter, the color blue, the green of the fields, the freshness of a cold wind, or the tawny hue of a winter landscape.

To see the full miraculous essentiality of the color blue is to be grateful with no necessity for a word of thanks. To see fully, the beauty of a daughter’s face is to be fully grateful without having to seek a God to thank him. To sit among friends and strangers, hearing many voices, strange opinions; to intuit inner lives beneath surface lives, to inhabit many worlds at once in this world, to be a someone amongst all other someones, and therefore to make a conversation without saying a word, is to deepen our sense of presence and therefore our natural sense of thankfulness that everything happens both with us and without us, that we are participants and witnesses all at once.

Thankfulness finds its full measure in generosity of presence, both through participation and witness. We sit at the table as part of every other person’s world while making our own world without will or effort, this is what is extraordinary and gifted, this is the essence of gratefulness, seeing to the heart of privilege. Thanksgiving happens when our sense of presence meets all other presences. Being unappreciative might mean we are simply not paying attention.

From Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words © 2014 Many Rivers Press. 

 

Last night I dreamt I was (by Christine Valters Paintner)

 

Last night I dreamt I was

 

flying, slow circles though space,
ascending north to see polar bears
with their curls of breath and then
rainbow ribbons spreading across sky,
stitching stars together.
I swooped and swirled through
orange canyons, over blue peaks,
inhaling the world
like freshly plucked blossoms.

Last night I dreamt I was spying
on the life I thought I wanted,
the grand sweep of space,
flinging myself out to the very edges,
climbing from silver day to flushed evening,
feeling the pulsing stretch of wingspan.

Last night I dreamt I was crying,
unbearable untethered floating freedom,
seeing my shadow cast far below.
I ached for you out of reach,
I soared expecting a symphony of spheres,
but I just missed your song.

Last night I awakened from a dream
and your spine was pressed against mine,
the weighted warmth of blankets,
my foot extended to catch the coolness,
dawn light distilled,
summoning forth the world.
I thought of the hedgerows outside our door
heavy with herbs,
and rain murmuring on the grass.

Sometimes I look up and see trails
of myself traversing the sky.
But mostly I am grateful for gravity.
Grateful for all that keeps me in your orbit.

She came. She conquered. She left [26/01/21]

  

I could not take a photograph of

the exquisite softness of your fur

and so your memory is

locked in the pores of my fingertips

 

I could not capture

your comforting animal smell

and so your scent is

sealed in the hairs of my nostrils

 

I could not record the sound of

your stealth, interrupted only by a

discreet cat-lick, and so your silence is

secured in the membranes of my ears

 

I could not forget

your beautiful trusting eyes

and so your soul is

nestled inside my heart

 

Can an image or word ever capture your sheer presence?

Trouble not the heart with this question for it knows your being

No perfect-moment capture necessary

 

The heart is the witness to your true nature

Blessed is the heart that knew you