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David Whyte's avatar

Any intimate relationship, whether it be with a person, a work or the land in which we dwell always becomes a fierce invitational road to both the exquisiteness of emotional proximity and the difficulties of feeling far away. It is a mercy to think that actually, the faraway-ness of a person or a horizon always carries its own kind of beauty, a beauty that asks us to leave others and leave the land radically alone to be itself to free them and it from what happens when we live too closely and too unheedingly for too long a time. DW

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Donna Elle's avatar

To know thyself in all the aloneness of our trials we have set for ourself; from the meadows to the desert and find comfort amongst the stone laid horizon I glimpse beyond and into my imagined life I am living . ❤️

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Deborah Bonham's avatar

Love the photo esp and the description of how the land holds the extremes of wetness and dryness. ( here in Australia we have mammoth floods and destructive algae bloom from heatwave killing those marine life that previously flourished. So sad these unnatural extremes!!

Myself I feel at one with the land. Its eternal nature holds me. I hope it can continue. 🙏🌱🌊

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Bonnie Ryan-Fisher's avatar

I made my first, and likely what will be my only, trip to Ireland last fall. Ireland, the homeland of my ancestors. Although I thought I expected a sense of belonging there, I was unprepared for how deeply it touched me and how it has stayed with me, though I've visited many countries over my lifetime. Here, these words speak to me:

and you will

carry on

through all the seasons

of your living and dying

until

your aloneness

becomes equal

to the trials

you have set yourself.

And I find myself wondering if we carry an aloneness, a longing, until we find our feet back on the ground we were intended to live upon, even if we stand there for only short time.

Thanks for this, as always, David.

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Betty Everett's avatar

In Scotland. The stone circles call me to dance. Feeling of this world and connected to other worlds, times and places

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Betty Everett's avatar

I love this. The ultimate tension of opposites

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