Intimate Invitation

you live daily, saying ‘love’ as if it were still far away

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The first day of my Cumbrian walking tour I love to take people to Lingmoor Fell, high above Blea Tarn and Langdale nestled below. The sheer beauty of the serried hills and the endless sky always brings out, not only a rosy glow in the faces of those looking out, but in that inner complexion we so often neglect when bereft of beauty and horizon in our lives; when bereft of the invitation that lies in the horizons, near and far, of our astonishing world.

Photo: © David Whyte

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INTIMATE INVITATION

You forget
how, even when
you are barely
mobile,
even when
you feel bereft
of any horizon,
and even when
without faith, 
you feel held back
and afraid to move
even a little,
you can still be like 
the beauty 
we see in winter ice,
just
beginning to
break and flow.

You forget
how you 
can still see so clearly
the brave outline
of a single leaf.

How the stream
of clouds in the sky
can run
right through you,

and the sun on your skin
seems to pass 
right through 
to some 
inner complexion.

And because 
after all this time
you live, and have lived
for so long without faith
in your own joys
and your own grief,

you live daily,
saying ‘love’
as if it were 
still far away.

But come here now,
into the arms 
of the waiting world,
put down 
that heavy burden
you have carried so long,
and rest 
from the hard, 
every day labour
of not hurting,
or not feeling, 
or not hearing, 
or not saying 
or seeing.

Stop keeping
the tears at bay.

Give it all up, 
just come home.

-The original version of this poem can be found in Still Possible.