Whoteheartedness

Judy sent me a snippet from "Crossing the Unknown Sea" by David Whyte in which he describes a conversation with a wise friend who said "The antidote to exhaustion is wholeheartedness." ... "You are so tired through and through because a good half of what you do ... has nothing to do with your true powers, or the place you have reached in your life. You are only half here, and half here will kill you after a while. You need something to which you can give your full powers. You know what that is; I don't have to tell you." "You are like Rilke's Swan in his awkward waddling across the ground; the swan doesn't cure his awkwardness by beating himself on the back, by moving faster, or by trying to organize himself better. He does it by moving toward the elemental water where he belongs. It is the simple contact with the water that gives him grace and presence. You only have to touch the elemental waters in your own life, and it will transform everything.. But you have to let yourself down into those waters from the ground on which you stand, and that can be hard. Particularly if you think you might drown." "...takes courage, and the word courage in English comes from the old French word cuer, heart. You must do something heartfelt, and you must do it soon. Let go of all this effort, and let yourself down, however awkwardly, into the waters of the work you want for yourself. It's all right, you know, to support yourself with something secondary until your work has ripened, but once it has ripened to a transparent fullness, it has to be gathered in. You have ripened already, and you are waiting to be brought in. Your exhaustion is a form of inner fermentation. You are beginning, ever so slowly to rot on the vine." ... I gave a shiver at that last image, and recoiled from the prospect. It was a prospect of an early death experienced while still alive and it jolted me out of my exhausted torpor, as if some imaginative adrenaline was now beginning to flow through my system. I looked back at him, and realized that simply in the act of coming awake for a moment, my tiredness was falling away. His words had helped to lower me deeper into myself, down into some imaginative buoyancy, had plucked me off the vine; whatever the metaphor of harvest or arrival, it was happening right there in the room. From outside the window you would have seen a younger man and an older man speaking intently over two glasses of wine, their books put aside, You would see the younger one lean forward, purse his lips, say something, laugh, and sit back again. You would have seen a moment of light intimacy; you would not have known anything had changed profoundly for the younger man in that instant. But everything had changed.

I said, "That's it, that's it exactly." I sat back. What came to my mind even as he was speaking, were the faces of all my colleagues in the organization, with whom I would have to have those difficult, courageous conversations in order to change my work; change my work more toward teaching, more toward speaking, more toward poetry. It was a daunting prospect, but I wouldn't be put off the task. I was so shaken by the moment in the doorway earlier that day and by the strong, pivotal words of Brother David's that I took those conversations as a felt challenge and discipline from that moment on. I realized I had nowhere else to go.