Destiny

always has a possessor, as in my destiny or your destiny or her destiny; it gives a sense of something we cannot avoid or something waiting for us; it is a word of storybook or mythic dimension. Destiny is hardly used in everyday conversation; it is a word that invites belief or disbelief: we reject the ordering of events by some fated, unseen force or we agree that there seems to be a greater hand than our own, working at the edges of even the most average life. But speaking of destiny not only grants us a sense of our own possibilities but gives us an intimation of our flaws: we sense, along with Shakespeare, that what is unresolved or unspoken in human character might overwhelm the better part of ourselves.

When we choose between these two poles, of mythic triumph or fated failure, we may miss the everyday conversational essence of destiny: our future influenced by the very way we hold the conversation of life itself, never mind any actions we might take or neglect to take. Two people, simply by looking at the future in radically different ways, have completely different futures awaiting them, no matter their immediate course of action. Even the same course of action, coming from a different way of shaping the conversation, will result in a different outcome. We are shaped by our shaping of the world and are shaped again in turn. The way we face the world alters the face we see in the world.

Strangely, every person always lives out their destiny, no matter what they do, according to the way they shape the conversation, but that destiny may be lived out on the level of consummation or complete frustration, through experiencing a homecoming or a distant sense of exile, or more likely some gradation along the spectrum that lies between. It is still our destiny, our life, but the sense of satisfaction involved and the possibility of fulfilling its promise may depend upon a brave participation, a willingness to hazard ourselves in a difficult world, a certain form of wild generosity with our gifts; a familiarity with our own depth, our own discovered, surprising breadth; and always, a long practised and robust vulnerability equal to what any future may offer. Our destiny is fated not only by great powers beyond our beckoning horizon but by the very way we shape and hold the everyday conversations of a familiar life.

-from Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning in Everyday Words

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Live virtual sessions for the July 2026 Series, Letting Go: Finding the Secret, Hidden but Difficult Beauty in Every Ending will take place July 12th, 19th and 26th with session recordings available to all registered attendees until December 1st.

Paid subscribers receive $35 off the registration fee of $75 for the series. If you are a paid subscriber and have not received a coupon code, write to support@davidwhyte.com and someone will be happy to assist you.

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Letting Go

Finding the Secret, Hidden but Difficult Beauty in Every Ending

The ending of relationships, the ending of friendships, the ending of a work, a conversation that is making us smaller, a book we are trying to write, or even a single line of a poem: all of them difficult, all of them, in their particular form of ending, necessary. We find most endings difficult and nearly all of them hurtful and traumatic and yet almost always afterwards, after each ending, we find we would never voluntarily reverse things and go back to our old life.

The poet Rilke said ‘Be ahead of all parting’ as an invitation to a radically anticipatory way of living that is just as committed to letting go as it is to taking on.

The stakes are always high in every letting go and every ending. The way we leave can shape our new life to the good or to the bad. In the very seed of the ending and the integrity with which we make the passage from old to new, grows the fresh and vibrant life that emerges so surprisingly from our difficult moving on.

The ability to anticipate these new arrivals and hold to what is firm and true through all our successive experiences of falling apart is exactly what makes a foundation for a new life, a new home, a new love or a new work. The hidden beauty of endings almost always lives in the letting go. What is marvelous and truly beautiful in a new life always arises from what is initially invisible, from what seems like a secret; from what is hidden, both inside us and in the very physical world into which we are stepping.

During the Three Sundays in July, we will look at all the visible and invisible endings that mark a human life and that, when approached with the right insight, the right perspective and often surprisingly small but courageous acts of letting go, provide us with the new beginning we need.

With anticipation,

Explore past Three Sundays Series:

"The Creative Path"

"The Cost of Love"

JANE AUSTEN QUOTE ON GETTING TO KNOW SOMEONE

“It is not time or opportunity that is to determine intimacy; it is disposition alone. Seven years would be insufficient to make some people acquainted with each other, and seven days are more than enough for others.”

But there was one eligible stranger who came into the neighborhood who stood out in particular, and whose disposition Jane found immediately attractive: Tom Lefroy, a quiet, serious graduate of Trinity College, Dublin, who came to stay with his aunt, Jane’s friend and mentor Anne Lefroy. He was known to have a “kind disposition and affectionate heart” but he was also a man of long and diffident silences that Jane seemed to have found strangely attractive and a perfect foil for her quick and lively mind. It was said at the time that Jane made all the moves, but the relationship does not seem to have been all one-way, as there are memories of a sudden visit by him, which surprised Jane. There is also note of a long private conversation about the risqué and erotically charged novel Tom Jones that must have been full of possible signs and portents for both of them.

Readers of Jane Austen will be familiar with the assiduous way in which her female characters add up the mounting evidence that an offer of marriage is about to be made. In the run-up to a ball, after which Tom would go back to Dublin, Jane was so sure of Tom’s intent that she wrote to her sister: “I rather expect to receive an offer. . . .” She covered up the out-loudness-of-it-all only by saying, “But I shall refuse him unless he promises to give away his white coat.”

Jane had no possibility of changing Tom’s habits of dress; his aunt Anne Lefroy, though a close friend of Jane’s, spirited him out of harm’s way. Tom was the great hope of dozens of poorer Lefroy relations who hoped to rise with him into his glittering legal future. Anne Lefroy knew that in their eyes, Jane was a perfect nobody, bringing little in the way of dowry or prestige; the Lefroy family would be scandalized at the match. Too much was at stake to allow mere love and affection to undermine it.

JANE AUSTEN QUOTE SHOWING HER DEPTH OF FEELING

“At length the day is come on which I am to flirt my last with Tom Lefroy and when you receive this it will be over. My tears flow at the melancholy idea.”

Looking back over Jane Austen’s life, we see in Tom’s appearance and disappearance, a high-water mark of her prospects in marriage. Her letters from then on show a gradual acknowledgment of her increasingly slighter prospects for a match.

JANE AUSTEN QUOTE SHOWING LACK OF SELF-PITY, DESPITE PREVIOUSLY FLOWING TEARS

“Next week I shall begin my operations on my hat, on which you know my principal hopes of happiness depend.”

Looking back over her life, we can also be thankful from our perspective that Jane was able to work not only on her hat but on her novels. There is little chance we would have a word of her in print had she gone off and married the then young, but, we are sad to hear, soon to become very boring Tom Lefroy. There is also little doubt that a marriage with a man would have smothered the second very important marriage with her work.

A Different Consummation

Had Jane Austen married Tom Lefroy, we might very well be living in a world in which Pride and Prejudice would never have seen the light of day. We would be without the scintillating, intelligent vivacity of an Elizabeth Bennet and the smoldering, aristocratic eroticism of a Darcy and his unfathomable wealth. We might be unable to recognize an obnoxious Mr. Collins when we see one, or the snobby condescension of a Lady Catherine de Bourgh.

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Orphan Lamb

A black lamb centered in a green field,
his thin breathed-into sides confirming
his bereft call for milk amongst the bedraggled
white fleeced mothers, looking on,

who stood and watched, not hearing
‘plaintive’ or ‘lost’ or ‘waiting to be fed’
but the cry of another mother’s son
needing to find his own way back

to the flow-source of milk and the warm
fleece hug of his mother’s belly
swaying above the teat. They would stand
above his black skeletal form beneath the trees

dropping their heads to drive him off
and stamp and turn again, nudging their own
half hesitant, half happy lambs away.
We walked the fields an hour looking

for a mother standing alone or with a single lamb,
the burnt sun falling to a misted light,
the trees become silhouettes, black as the lamb itself,
our eyes and ears in the crowded field

bent to the ancient prayer rising around us,
the evensong of grief and motherhood,
call and response, wanting and not wanting,
the church bell call of a passing rook
sounding the hour as the last pale
just burnt gold of a cloud framed
our shadows, walking the lit vale
toward the car, toward loss, toward

something in our low disappointed voices
trying to remember from childhood both
the sense of source and the act of being pushed away,
where we were wanted and where we were not.

In the end, we took him home, to a waiting mother
who had lost her own, penned in a barn,
her grown head turned away in the wooden crush
so the lamb could drink and hours later

in the sweet hay strewn dark of the enclosing barn
the mother ewe could smell her own milk
tasted through the lamb’s own breath
their mutual life come to life by self-recognition,

the black lamb pulling mightily at the dugs
as the mother looked on, as we looked on,
and looked at one another
passing the tiny airline bottle,
the faint breath of whisky from our nip
misting and pluming in the half-lit barn.

The single, full malt taste of something met,
a breathing through in the chest, a way of coming to
and of tasting again, the essence of wanting to live,
something paid for by our seeking and our patience,
just a tang, a hint, a mere breath in the glow light,
of being born again.


-from The Bell and the Blackbird

'The Bell and the Blackbird'

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The Seven Streams

Come down drenched, at the end of May,
with the cold rain so far into your bones
that nothing will warm you except your
own walking, and let the sun come out
at day’s end near Slievenaglusha
with the rainbows doubling over Mulloch Mor
and see your clothes steaming in the bright air.

Be a provenance of something gathered,
a summation of previous intuitions,
let your vulnerabilities walking 
on the cracked sliding limestone
be this time, not a weakness, but a faculty
for understanding what’s about to happen.

Stand above the Seven Streams
letting the deep-down current surface 
around you, then branch and branch
as they do, back into the mountain
and as if you were able for that flow,
say the few necessary words
and walk on, broader and cleansed
for having imagined.

The Seven Streams are a geographical and mythological anomaly in a remote part of the Burren mountains of North Clare; an ancient, difficult to find place of sanctity and healing. The water is pure, as is the air.

The water appears from beneath a limestone escarpment, creates a clear, wide pool, then meanders through a short, shallow valley before disappearing, like our own lives, to appear again, seemingly defying the laws of physics by reappearing as seven separate flows beneath the cliff below. It is always a place that points to what is essential, what must be uncovered, and what must be let alone, to go its own way.

—from David Whyte: Essentials

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'David Whyte: Essentials'

“The quarrels of popes and kings, with wars and pestilences in every page; the men all so good for nothing and hardly any women at all—it is very tiresome.” —Jane Austen

Sometimes the choices we make around relationships and work seem to have no choice in them at all. Each of us grapples with forces far larger than our goals or ourselves: each of us wrestles with our family inheritance, our educational possibilities, the lucky or unlucky DNA that ordains our health and, especially, the fateful time in history into which we were born.

There are other powers we like to forget. Nature can be a deadly arbiter of our future, independent of our human need to plan. Nature’s winds can drive us out of a city, destroy our schools and undermine a health system for years to come. A tsunami can devastate a thousand miles of coastline, and constant rain may inundate half a nation. As human beings, we have a necessary conceit about our own ability to influence events. The truth about our own modest contribution might immobilize us: much easier then, to tell ourselves a story about how much we make our own reality. The United States, that supposed bedrock home of upward mobility, is actually one of the developed industrial nations where people are most likely to live and die in the class to which they were born. We are creatures who like to believe our own publicity, and we do not like to face powers that can easily surpass and encompass our best hopes. We hope always for a free pass to circumvent forces that humble us on a daily basis.

Although we can never escape these overarching powers and difficulties, it can be instructive to look to those who have made sense of their life or their work in the midst of overwhelming circumstances, circumstances where we would have every reason either not to try or to look the other way and pretend they did not exist.

Shakespeare’s sonnet 64 is unstintingly courageous in this regard: it demonstrates the kind of courage needed to look the leveled World Trade Center towers in the eye, to survey a devastated New Orleans or to say goodbye for the last time in the face of a loved one’s death.

When I have seen by Time’s fell hand defaced
The rich-proud cost of outworn buried age;
When sometime lofty towers I see down-razed
And brass eternal slave to mortal rage;
When I have seen the hungry ocean gain
Advantage on the kingdom of the shore,
And the firm soil win of the watery main,
Increasing store with loss, and loss with store;
When I have seen such interchange of state,
Or state it self confounded to decay,
Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate
That Time will come and take my love away.
This thought is as a death which cannot choose
But weep to have, that which it fears to lose.

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I thought this quote just right for my present sojourn in the mountainous area of Northwest England known as the Lake District. This is probably the most serious tour I run as far as ‘walking’ is concerned and this photo by Bodi Hallett catches the urgency and changeable nature of the weather on these spectacular tops.

For the Road to Santiago

For the road to Santiago,
don’t make new declarations
about what to bring
and what to leave behind.

Bring what you have.

You were always going
that way anyway,
you were always
going there all along.


-from Still Possible

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Fifty

New mown,
the great pale gold
stretch of field
revealed beneath
the absent barley
like a lovely upturned face
already starred with green
from the clover
growing to replace it --
and with the harvest done,
the mower parked
and the field
left to silence,
the dogs bound happily
in the cleared space
while Patrick stands,
head thrown back
in laughter by the gate.

Sometimes we are surprised
by the steal and turn
of beauty
through a working life,
the ruffling wind
stirring the barley
behind backs
bent in worldly concentration,
thinking we had planted
just to eat and sell,
forgetting the way things
meet and conspire
round the focused endeavor.

That daughter
standing with us
we thought we knew,
grown into womanhood
while the field is sown,
or a partner’s face,
harvest within harvest,
softened by age
our eyes renewed
by a sudden
and unfamiliar, familiar.

And then this new mown field
close to the house
stretched away now
to some
horizon
beyond all attempt
to bring one year
to a recognized harvest.

And no end time now
looking at the cleared field,
no time at all
but time as if collapsed
and concentrated
around us,
stunning us to quiet
through the hush and light
of absence itself,
the gold wave of barley
come and gone,
the cutting away of the ripe
and ready to go
revealing beneath
like a breath not taken,
like a thought not fully made,
like the year ahead
not yet lived,
the minted
clover,
green and new,
and ourselves
together
looking on
as if living in a gifted,
unlooked for
second life,
seeing again
how
an empty cup
can brim once more
to the gleam,

like some miracle at Cana
and we the guests
having witnessed
everything taken away,
expectant only of winter,
ready to turn away,
saw
spring laid bare
right
beneath it;
then stood together
hands on each other’s shoulders
the chrism of the sight
in our eyes,
all expectation felled
and grown,
ready in a moment
to believe again.



-from Pilgrim

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Ambition

is a word that lacks any real ambition. Ambition is desire frozen, the current of a vocational life immobilised and over-concretised to set unforgiving goals. Ambition may be essential for the young and as yet unrealised life, but becomes the essential obstacle of any mature life. Ambition abstracts us from the underlying elemental nature of the creative conversation while providing us the cover of a target that has become false through over-description, overfamiliarity or too much understanding.

The ease of having an ambition is that it can be explained to others; the very disease of ambition is that it can be so easily explained to others. What is worthy of a life’s dedication does not want to be known by us in ways that diminish its actual sense of presence. Everything true to itself has its own secret language and an internal intentionality with a secret, surprising flow, even to the person who supposedly puts it all in motion.

Ambition ultimately withers all secrets in its glare before those secrets have had time to come to life from within, and then thwarts the generosity and maturity that ripens the discourse of a lifetime’s dedication to a work.

We may direct the beam of ambition to illuminate a certain corner of the future world, but ultimately it can reveal to us only those dreams with which we have already become familiar. Ambition left to itself, like the identity of the average billionaire, always becomes tedious, its only object the creation of larger and larger empires of control; but a true vocation calls us out beyond ourselves, breaks our heart in the process and then humbles, simplifies and enlightens us about the hidden, core nature of the work that enticed us in the first place. We find that, all along, we had what we needed from the beginning and that in the end we have returned to its essence, an essence we could not understand until we had experienced the actual heartbreak of the journey.

No matter the self-conceited importance of our labours we are all compost for worlds we cannot yet imagine. Ambition takes us toward that horizon, but not over it – that line will always recede before our controlling hands. But a calling is a conversation between our physical bodies, our work, our intellects and imaginations, and a new world that is itself the territory we seek. A vocation always includes the specific, heartrending way we will fail at our attempt to live fully. A true vocation always metamorphoses both ambition and failure into compassion and understanding for others.

Ambition takes willpower and constant applications of energy to stay on a perceived bearing; but a serious vocational calling demands a constant attention to the unknown gravitational field that surrounds us and from which we recharge ourselves, as if breathing from the atmosphere of possibility itself. A life’s work is not a series of stepping-stones, onto which we calmly place our feet, but more like an ocean crossing where there is no path, only a heading, a direction, in conversation with the elements. Looking back, we see the wake we have left as only a brief glimmering trace on the waters.

Ambition is natural to the first steps of youth, who must experience its essential falsity to know the larger reality that stands behind it, but held on to too long, and especially in eldership, it always comes to lack surprise, turns the last years of the ambitious into a second childhood, and makes the once successful into an object of pity.

The authentic watermark running through the background of a life’s work is an arrival at generosity and, as a mark of that generosity, delight in the hopes of the young: and the giving away to them, not only of rewards that may have been earned but the reward in the secret itself, the core artistry that made the journey a journey.

Perhaps the greatest legacy we can leave from our work is not to instil ambition in others, though this may be the first way we describe its arrival in our life, but the passing on of a sense of sheer privilege, of having found a road, a way to follow, and then having been allowed to walk it, often with others, with all its difficulties and minor triumphs; the underlying primary gift of having been both a witness to and a full participant in the conversation.

-from Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words: Revised Edition

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Dougie

My uncle Dougie
was killed
on Sword Beach,
the 6th of June,
nineteen hundred
and forty four.

The cadence
of the date
like a slow chant
in my father’s mind
round the one
central memory.

Dougie taught
him how to swim
before he died.

There are other words
still said
in unassuming
reverence
when our heads bend
over the letters
and you remake
and relive

the familiar loss,
as if forging his absence
new again,
each phrase measured
by its careful
placement in silence.

His regiment,
The East Yorkshires
I remember since
childhood and,
your Grandma and Grandpa
didn’t know for months,
and now in final silence
the bleak
unnatural
and late arriving telegram
folded
and unfolded
down fifty years.

Sometimes I know
my father is
a young boy again
and Dougie,
teaching him how to swim,
has suddenly turned away
as if in a dream
and looks toward
France.

Then he is low down
in the water
near the horrific shore
and my father’s arms
so recently taught
to live in that element
are reaching
to pull him back.

But the weighted surge
of his elder
brother’s
pack and rifle

pull too much
for the young boy’s arms.

Now I remember
my father’s repeated
weekend need
for the ice cold waters
where he taught me
how to swim
and his fatherly
satisfaction
at the slowly
growing strokes
that kept his son
above water.

I could not know what
was being given then
not knowing
how as the years pass
we must always strike
boldly to save those close to us,
hold them
above the drowning water
with our words,
so they live again,

if not the man,
then the loved
memory,

father to son,
brother to brother,
hand dipping in the water
toward shore,
saving them
now
as we could not then,
phrase by repeated phrase.


-from The House of Belonging 

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Santiago

The road seen, then not seen, the hillside hiding
then revealing the way you should take, the road
dropping away from you as if leaving you to walk
on thin air, then catching you, holding you up,
when you thought you would fall, and the way
forward always in the end the way that you follo…

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The Bell Ringer

Consider the bell
ringer as an image
of the human soul,
he stands foursquare
on the stone flagged
ground, and surrounded
by a circle of communal
concentration
searches in his fixed
aloneness
for a world
beyond straight,
human,
eye to eye
discourse,
in this case
above him,
the collision of metal
worlds chiming
to each bend and lift
of the knees,
letting his weight
bear down
on the rope,
creating out of the heave
and upward pull,
a hollowed out
brass utterance,
a resonant
on-going argument
for his continued presence,
independent
of daily mood
or the necessities
for a verbal
proclamation.

Consider the reason
for his continued
attendance
to the art.
Caught in a committed
circle of constant practice
yet freed in the vertical
from a horizontal
ever present
and exhausting
human participation,
the ultimate arbitration
an over arching,
straight-out
relationship
with sound.

Somewhere above
in the vertical
he touches
another firmament,
his face
lined, preoccupied
or even set
against the world,
can still announce joy
in the sweet resonance
of birth,
or drama
in the long,
extended,
over and over
carillions of
marriage.

No matter
the clarity
or cloudiness
of the day,
he can follow
that out-going tide
of sound right
to the very edge
of the circled
horizon
until it ebbs back
around him
into the center
of things,
pooling
to a more
rhythmic toll,
a deeper,
more concentrated
commemoration,
the knelling way
the world sounds
inside
when
we’ve heard
the ease and release
of a last breath.

Let him stand there
then
for the human soul,
let his weight
come true on the rope,
the way we want to lean
into the center of things,
the way we want to
fall with the gravity
of the situation
and then afterwards
laugh and
defy it with an
upward ultimately
untraceable flight,
a great ungovernable
ringing
announcement
to the world
that
something, somewhere,
has changed.

Consider
the bellringer
as one of us,
attempting some
unachieved,
magnificent
difference in the world,
far above
and far beyond
the stone-closed
space
we seem
to occupy.

Below
we’re all
effort, listening
and willful concentration,
above,
like a moving sea,
another power
shoulders
just for a moment
the whole burden,
lifts us
against our will,
lets us find
in the skyward pull
a needed antidote
to surface noise,
a gravity against gravity,
a sky shot through stone, a clear note,
another way to hear
amid
the clamor of the heavens.


-from Everything is Waiting for You

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Everything is Waiting for You

The hidden beauty of endings almost always lives in the letting go.

Letting Go: Finding the Secret, Hidden Beauty in Every Ending

The ending of relationships, the ending of friendships, the ending of a work, a conversation that is making us smaller, a book we are trying to write, or even a single line of a poem: all of them difficult, all of them, in their particular form of ending, necessary. We find most endings difficult and nearly all of them hurtful and traumatic and yet almost always afterwards, after each ending, we find we would never voluntarily reverse things and go back to our old life.

The poet Rilke said, “Be ahead of all parting” as an invitation to a radically anticipatory way of living that is just as committed to letting go as it is to taking on.

The stakes are always high in every letting go and every ending. The way we leave can shape our new life to the good or to the bad. In the very seed of the ending and the integrity with which we make the passage from old to new, grows the fresh and vibrant life that emerges so surprisingly from our difficult moving on.

The ability to anticipate these new arrivals and hold to what is firm and true through all our successive experiences of falling apart is exactly what makes a foundation for a new life, a new home, a new love or a new work. The hidden beauty of endings almost always lives in the letting go. What is marvelous and truly beautiful in a new life always arises from what is initially invisible, from what seems like a secret; from what is hidden, both inside us and in the very physical world into which we are stepping.

Letting go clears the way to seeing more clearly what was there all along.

Join me for Three Sundays in July, to look at all the visible and invisible endings that mark a human life and that, when approached with the right insight, the right perspective and often surprisingly small but courageous acts of letting go, provide us with the new beginning we need.

Live virtual sessions for Letting Go will take place on July 12th, 19th and 26th. Session recordings and resources will be made available for all registered attendees until December 1st, 2026.

Paid Substack subscribers receive $35 off the cost of registration. If you are a paid Substack subscriber, and have not received a discount code in email for the July 2026 Series, contact support@davidwhyte.com and someone will be happy to assist you.

Register for 'Letting Go'

Note: If you have not registered for a Three Sundays Series on davidwhyte.com website, you will need to create a username and password in order to register and access the series resource materials.

With anticipation,

and all of us at Many Rivers

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The Revised Edition of The House of Belonging is newly designed in a smaller travel-friendly format and contains the latest text of the poems.

The Hawthorn

The crossed knot
in the hawthorn bark
and the stump
of the sawn off branch
hemmed by
the roughened trunk.
In that
omniscient black eye
of witness
I see the dark no-growth
of what has passed
grown round by
what has come to pass,
looking at me
as if I could speak.

So much that was
good in her,
so much in me,
cut off now
from the future
in which we
grew together.

Now
through the window
of my new house
that hawthorn’s
crooked faithful
trunk round
an old and broken
growth,
my mouth dumb
and
Dante’s voice
instead of mine
from the open book.

Brother, our love
has laid our wills to rest.
Making us long
only for what is ours
and by no other thirst
possessed.

Our life not lived
together
must still
live on apart,
longing only
for what is ours
alone,
each grow
round the missed branch
as best we can,
claim what is ours
separately,
though not forget
loved memories,
nor that life
still loved by memory,
nor the hurts
through which we
hesitantly
tried to learn
affection.

Our pilgrim journey
apart or together,
like the thirst
of everything
to find its true form,
the grain of the wood
round the hatched knot
still straightening
toward the light.


-from The House of Belonging: Revised Edition

Sometimes what we learn from a parting of ways lies in the very sadness and poignancy of the leaving itself. Once so together, now so far apart and yet still somehow forever living in an unspoken parallel: what was brought into the world somehow still alive not only in our separate lives but also in what our former togetherness bequeathed to the world... DW

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Our hours are numerous on this earth, but a real appreciation for most of those hours is rare. Our overemphasis on the productions of time and motion obscures the magic and spaciousness of the hours themselves, which are born again and again irrespective of whether they are worked or no. When we work only to do, we most often find ou…

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Paid subscribers receive $35 off the registration fee of $75 for the series. If you are a paid subscriber and have not received a coupon code, write to support@davidwhyte.com and someone will be happy to assist you.

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The Creative Path

Carrying What is Hidden as a Gift to Others

The difficult secret about creativity is that it is an invitation to travel the path of longing—longing for real meaning, real connection, and continual nourishing surprise that can enliven and even transform the lives of others.

We associate creativity with discipline and long hours but long hours make sense only if we are following a meaningful central trajectory—one that in the creative act itself seems to issue from our bodies like a comet’s tail out into the world.

Creativity is an invitation to transgress—once we take the step toward creating, we always betray our known self and the inherited stories we hold close, the scaffolding of our entire identity, and the structures and systems that held us in place. This is why it feels so difficult. This is why we feel as if we are ‘blocked’, we really, actually feel as if we are losing our sense of self. This is why the creative path can feel so distant and elusive: to create is to betray your home and set off into a distant unknown place.

Creativity demands choosing longing over belonging: that choice asks us to risk losing grip with what makes sense—to drop into a state where the familiar self cannot follow a known path. So many things can be created easily and unconsciously—chaos, resentment, envy—even destruction—can be created on a daily basis without effort or intention. Meaningful creativity is something else entirely—it puts us in cultivated, intimate companionship with the world and with the struggles of other human beings—fellow creatures trying to get things right and failing awkwardly most of the time.

To follow the path of creativity is to stay in the unknown long enough for it to become aliveness—and to shape that aliveness into forms of beauty and life-changing insight—the gift of being given new eyes or ears for this world or even a new mind for an imagined future. These dreams beneath the surface made real through our creative gifts, are the fruits of a long and conscious path—a harvest that asks us to keep listening to the inner urgencies of our life—and the way those urgencies arrive in all the hours of our everyday lives.

Bringing our inner and outer worlds together is the theme of these three Sundays in May. Following a creative path that always asks us to shape a way of being equal to every mode of doing.

In the third Sunday of the series, I will be joined by Rick Rubin, producer and interpretive maestro for so many famous musicians of all genres, but also the best-selling author of The Creative Act: A Way of Being. Rick has interviewed me in many of his own Tetragrammaton podcasts and is now willing to take some of his own good medicine on the Three Sundays Series!

Explore past Three Sundays Series:

March 2026: "The Cost of Love"

Jan 2026: "The Invitational Identity"

Trees

In writing about trees
the hand
should burst a thousand leaves
on the page
or spread in silhouette
the curled branches
between words

so that as we read
the white hollows between words
can be the wind
or in certain poems, stillness
so that as eyes
descend the page, smoke rises
straight
toward heaven

as the lines descend down
to…

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