Sweet Darkness

Written and read by David Whyte

When your eyes are tired
the world is tired also.

When your vision has gone,
no part of the world can find you.

Time to go into the dark
where the night has eyes
to recognize its own.

There you can be sure
you are not beyond love.

The dark will be your home
tonight.

The night will give you a horizon
further than you can see.

You must learn one thing.
The world was made to be free in.

Give up all the other worlds
except the one to which you belong.

Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet
confinement of your aloneness
to learn

anything or anyone
that does not bring you alive

is too small for you.

“Sweet Darkness” from The House of Belonging by David Whyte. Copyright © Many Rivers Press, Langley, Washington. Used with permission of the poet.

This poem was originally read in the On Being episode “The Conversational Nature of Reality.”

 Sweet Darkness | The On Being Project - The On Being Project

David Whyte: Self Portrait

Resilience: A Conversation with David Whyte

Start Close In by David Whyte

START CLOSE IN,
DON’T TAKE THE SECOND STEP
OR THE THIRD,
START WITH THE FIRST
THING
CLOSE IN,
THE STEP
YOU DON’T WANT TO TAKE.

START WITH
THE GROUND
YOU KNOW,
THE PALE GROUND
BENEATH YOUR FEET,
YOUR OWN
WAY OF STARTING
THE CONVERSATION.

START WITH YOUR OWN
QUESTION,
GIVE UP ON OTHER
PEOPLE’S QUESTIONS,
DON’T LET THEM
SMOTHER SOMETHING
SIMPLE.

TO FIND
ANOTHER’S VOICE,
FOLLOW
YOUR OWN VOICE,
WAIT UNTIL
THAT VOICE
BECOMES A
PRIVATE EAR
LISTENING
TO ANOTHER.

START RIGHT NOW
TAKE A SMALL STEP
YOU CAN CALL YOUR OWN
DON’T FOLLOW
SOMEONE ELSE’S
HEROICS, BE HUMBLE
AND FOCUSED,
START CLOSE IN,
DON’T MISTAKE
THAT OTHER
FOR YOUR OWN.

START CLOSE IN,
DON’T TAKE
THE SECOND STEP
OR THE THIRD,
START WITH THE FIRST
THING
CLOSE IN,
THE STEP
YOU DON’T WANT TO TAKE.

-DAVID WHYTE, RIVER FLOW: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS

 

Into the blue shades (by Matt Licata)

It's okay to be sad, to feel a bit shaky and uncertain, melancholic, to lament, and to grieve.
Despite a collective disembodiment to the blue shades of the spectrum, these states are not evidence that something is wrong with you, that you have failed, that you need to meditate more or pray harder. Or that you need to become better at staying in the present moment, manifest the opposite of sadness, or transcend it by way of some process.

It is high-voltage evidence that you are alive, with a tender beating heart, subtle and perceptive mirror neurons, and senses that are open to the full-spectrum, chaotic glory of being a human being who is alive at this time.

Just in this one moment, be sad. Fully. Not partially. Go inside the sadness. Find the sad one there. Speak with her, listen to him, feel what she is feeling, see what he is seeing. Turn your body into a vessel, a temple where the lost orphans of psyche and soma can come to share their art, and rest.

Get close to the sad one, but not so close that you become flooded. Intimacy without fusion. Relationship without merging, honoring your own integrity, interiority, and perspective. Offer sanctuary and safe passage for the shattered pieces to unfold, illuminate, and reorganize.

Sadness and melancholy are not things you need to fix, cure, or transcend. They are arising at this moment not to be healed, but to be held. You need not shift sadness into some “higher” state or apply teachings so that it will yield into something else. For it is complete and pure on its own, as a unique messenger of the personal, cultural, and archetypal soul.

With the fire of awareness and the ally of your breath, descend into your belly, travel inside your heart, open a portal into your throat, your imagination, and the life force which is reverberating within you. Tend to the raw, shaky life that is longing to be held. And listen.

It is by way of this journey that sadness will be revealed to be what it is, a secret wisdom-guide and bridge into the universal heart, a messenger of power, mercy, and fierce compassion that wants you as its midwife.

A Healing Space... reflections on love, meaning, and the aliveness of immediate experience: Into the blue shades (alovinghealingspace.blogspot.com)

 

BLIND WILLIE JOHNSON - Trouble will soon be over (1927)

Drawn and recorded: Blind Willie in space (An Aeon video)

 

Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground, and brilliant is that song drifting through space

‘Johnson’s song concerns a situation he faced many times: nightfall with no place to sleep. Since humans appeared on Earth, the shroud of night has yet to fall without touching a man or woman in the same plight.’
Carl Sagan, on including Blind Willie Johnson’s Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground (1927) on the Voyager Golden Records

 

The US gospel blues musician and evangelist ‘Blind’ Willie Johnson was born to a sharecropping family in the small town of Pendleton, Texas in 1897. After learning to play a cigar-box guitar, he performed as a popular street musician throughout Texas, eventually recording 30 songs for Columbia Records between 1927 and 1930. Little notice was taken of his death in 1945, and much of his biography remains a mystery. What is certain, however, is that today his legendary low-register howl and slide guitar persists, both on our planet and in interstellar space. Here on Earth, his music influenced the likes of Bob Dylan, Led Zeppelin and Howlin’ Wolf. And just beyond the reaches of our solar system, his recording of his song Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground (1927) is one of 27 pieces of music selected for the Voyager spacecraft’s famed ‘Golden Records’, intended to capture the range of musical expression. This instalment from the US animator Drew Christie’s series Drawn & Recorded combines biography and mythology to recount how Johnson’s music made the unlikely journey from the streets of rural Texas to the stars.

Director: Drew Christie

Writers: Drew Christie, Bill Flanagan

Narrator: T Bone Burnett

Producers: T Bone Burnett, Bill Flanagan, Van Toffler

Website: Gunpowder & Sky

Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground, and brilliant is that song drifting through space | Aeon Videos