At Home

the arms of a fierce but healing world

One of the more difficult but rewarding states to achieve in today's world, where we seem to hover on the one hand between being completely overwhelmed by other people or finding ourselves in extreme states of isolation and loneliness. All the more necessary then, to learn how to be rewardingly alone, to find solace in the familiarity of our own breath and our own body and perhaps even, if we are lucky, our own garden. Resting into our aloneness, we inhabit our bodies as a beautiful unspoken question, rather than a fraught and never ending explanation.

Photo: © David Whyte

AT HOME

At home amidst
the bees
wandering
the garden
in the summer
light
the sky
a broad roof
for the house
of contentment
where I wish
to
live forever
in the eternity
of my own
fleeting
and momentary
happiness.

I walk toward
the kitchen
door as if walking
toward the
door of a recognized
heaven

and see the
simplicity
of shelves and
the blue dishes
and the
vapouring 
steam rising
from the kettle
that called me in.

Not just this
aromatic cup
from which to drink
but the flavour
of a life made whole
and lovely
through the
imagination
seeking its way.

Not just this
house around me
but the arms
of a fierce
but healing world.

Not just this line
I write
but the
innocence
of an earned
forgiveness
flowing again
through hands
made new with
writing.

And a man
with no company
but his house,
his garden,
and his own
well peopled solitude,

entering
the silences
and chambers
of the heart
to start again.

   -from The House of Belonging