Our Philosophies

Lost

Stand still.

The trees ahead and the bushes beside you Are not lost.
Wherever you are is called Here,
And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,
Must ask permission to know it and be known.
The forest breathes. Listen. It answers,
I have made this place around you,
If you leave it you may come back again, saying Here.

No two trees are the same to Raven.
No two branches are the same to Wren.
If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you,
You are surely lost. Stand still.
The forest knows Where you are.
You must let it find you.

An old Native American elder story rendered into modern English by David Wagoner, in The Heart Aroused - Poetry and the Preservation of the Soul in Corporate America by David Whyte, Currency Doubleday, New York, 1996.

Beat

Have you been travelling this road so long

For this

It may be so

It maybe that the size of life is measured by the

Hours

Days

Years

It takes for each of us to turn within the circle

of the slowest dance until we fall to the ground in

Desperation

Desolation

Fear

Not knowing how to rise to the silent beat again.

Lying motionless

Forever maybe

Without some known or unknown arms to pull us to our feet

Until time does its dance again.

One Day

One day I will say
the gift I once had has been taken.

The place I have made for myself
belongs to another,
and the words I have sung
are being sung by the ones
I would want.

Then I will be ready
for that voice
and the still silence in which it arrives.

And if my faith is good
then we’ll meet again
on the road
and we’ll be thirsty,
and stop
and laugh
and drink together again
from the deep well of things as they are.

From RIVER FLOW: New and Selected Poems
© David Whyte and Many Rivers Press

Come Away From The Din

Come away from the din.

Come away to the quiet fields,

over which the great sky stretches,

and where, between us and the stars,

there lies but silence;

and there, in the stillness

let us listen to the voice

that is speaking within us.

Jerome K Jerome