david whyte [obsession]

‘The whole invitation from poetry is that it is possible to speak what you think is impossible to say. And once you’ve said it you are freed into a larger territory… You can begin to speak what you feel needs to be said to a loved one, or to a colleague or a friend, or to yourself in the mirror’

David Whyte

I’ve been obsessed with David Whyte, an Irish poet who also is a Zen practitioner and avid rock climber, two deep interests of mine. Much like with my love for Pico Iyer, I find kindred souls through reading. You can’t help but be drawn to people who have the same proclivities, interests and ways of seeing.

I’ve been so deeply moved, that I’ve started trying to write poetry myself. The more I write, the more I find that the world is transformed. ‘Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity’.

A recurring theme that I think I wrote about almost a decade ago, was how language shapes your world. It colours the lens through which one sees. Although paradoxically, it is tricky at the same time because language is merely a pointer, not the actual ’thing itself’.

There was a period where I kind of dismissed language. “Language cannot capture ‘this’, the richness of reality”, as I sat daily in meditation, a place where language can be seen for what it is’.

But that was a mistaken view. For language is deeply powerful in its way to point to the ineffable.

I’ve literally had lines of David Whyte’s poetry instantaneously snap me into non-dual states of awareness, into the deepest attentive experiences and into breaking down in joyful tears. ‘The kettle is singing, even as it pours you a drink’.

Music is in the same domain as poetry.

I think this is the purpose of any art. To point at the world, so that you actually look, to open us in ways we can’t always do alone; to new ways of seeing, reframing, feeling, at a non verbal non conceptual experiential level.

Language and words are limited, but what they point to is unlimited and unable to be contained.