‘Sometimes’
I know new year resolutions are a required practice in many cultures. They may be significant to the beginning of your year but personally, I find them quite complicated. Perhaps the process seems artificial, perhaps it’s a lack of discipline, or perhaps they seem forced, I don’t know. They just don’t work for me.
This year I was gifted a book of poetry for Christmas, a book I’ve been enjoying these past days. Recently, the following poem was part of my morning read, and the words gave new light to how I could reflectively begin this new year. I appreciate Whyte’s images of quiet and awareness, and the treasured essential questions that await a spirit of attentiveness in order to come into my life. I wonder if this is the moment when a waiting question will make its way to me?
Sometimes
if you move carefully
through the forest,
breathing
like the ones
in the old stories,
who could cross
a shimmering
bed of leaves
without a sound,
you come
to a place
whose only task
is to trouble you
with tiny
but frightening requests,
conceived out of nowhere
but in this place
beginning to lead everywhere.
Requests to stop
what you are doing
right now,
and
to stop what you
are becoming
while you do it,
questions
that can make
or unmake
a life,
questions
that have patiently
waited for you.
questions
that have no right
to go away.
Sometimes
From ‘Everything Is Waiting for You’
and ‘River Flow: New and Selected Poems’
© David Whyte and Many Rivers Press 2003
Craig, Dec 2021
Photo by Michal Janek on Unsplash
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It’s a lovely invitation.
I love the images of quiet and awareness that you refer to. You can almost hear the silence of the forest in this poem inviting us to move carefully through it so as not to scare away those essential questions waiting for us to find them – if we become silent enough, like the forest, to hear them.