My entire life has been characterized by a yearning for wholeness. My career in strategy and all my business writings have focused on this idea of moving from fragmentation to coherence within organizations. And now I am seeing how much that external narrative characterized what I needed to do inside myself.
The world “out there” is simply a mirror reflection of the world inside ourselves. We heal the world by first healing within… by finding those parts that we’ve disowned or ignored in order to make other people happy, or to conform to expectations, or out of a simple inability to hear the still, small voice within us.
We start out whole as children, before the weight of the world starts challenging our sense of identity. Nearly everyone makes compromises to their identity during the growing-up process; trauma survivors even more so. The journey moves from wholeness to fragmentation and then, hopefully, back to wholeness again.
This poem by David Whyte captures a sense of what it feels like to be on the journey towards what our souls are yearning for.
TWICE BLESSED
So that I
stopped
there
and looked
into the waters,
seeing not only
my reflected face
but the great sky
that framed
my lonely figure
and after
a moment
I lifted my hands
and then my eyes
and I allowed
myself
to be astonished
by the great
everywhere
calling to me
like an old,
invisible
and unspoken
invitation,
made new
again
in the sun
and the spring,
and the cloud
and the light,
like something
in one moment
both calling to me
and radiating
from where I stood,
as if I could
understand
everything
I had been given
and everything ever
taken from me,
as if I could be
everything
I have ever
learned
and everything
I could ever know,
as if
I knew
both the way
I had come
and, secretly,
the way
I was still
promised to go,
brought together,
like this,
with the
yielding light
and the symmetry
of the moving sky,
caught in still waters.
Someone I have been,
and someone,
I am just
about to become,
something I am
and will be forever,
the sheer generosity
of being loved
through loving:
the miracle reflection
of a twice blessed life.
…
TWICE BLESSED
from
THE BELL AND THE BLACKBIRD
Poetry by David Whyte
APRIL 2018 © David Whyte and Many Rivers Press
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