Star

the opening of an invitation to a different way

Photo: © David Whyte

Driving alone, how many of us have experienced, not only moments of great beauty but also the threshold insights that have arisen from being immersed, hour after hour in that beauty? The road beyond Oughterard into the West and over past Maam in Connemara is always an invitation into both a disappearance and reappearance for me. The star was a surprise that evening, a beckoning hand, an intuition of the next epoch of my life, hovering just over the horizon of my understanding. DW

Star

North of Oughterard
there comes a sudden
lapse and steal of light
in the sky, the opening
of an invitation
to a different way
through land
once thought familiar,
and driving on
into the low western sun
the sense of
a parallel looked for
but not yet found,
the crack between the world
as you want it
and the world you
seem to have inherited,
the evening light beginning
to pale everything,
and the great discipline
remembering
to drive the road
into that disappearing
gleam and not lose sight
of the beckoning
interior horizon,
never to pass the door
to the liminal world,
but to go another
different way,
through Conamara
far from the traffic
that slows the mind
and the grey lash
of habit that feeds
our disappointment;
to drive and never
let the eyes fall once
to check the blurring screen,
but remember
to practice
the nobility
that comes with promise,
to drive out west,
the eyes level or lifted
the mind cleared;
the steering wheel
invisible
below the eye
but still
charting the needed course
and the body at tiptoe,
leaning toward
the windscreen,
the breath held
and the eyes
a-shiver for
a falling plume of sky;
the clear, pinpoint star
that just appeared
above Leenane,
one you
did not realize
you were following.



-from Pilgrim

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