THE FACES AT BRAGA In monastery darkness by the light of one flashlight, the old shrine room waits in silence. While above the door we see the terrible figure, fierce eyes demanding, 'Will you step through?' And the old monk leads us, bent back nudging blackness, prayer beads in the hand that beckons. We light the butter lamps and bow, eyes blinking in the pungent smoke, look up without a word, see faces in meditation, a hundred faces carved above, eye lines wrinkled in the hand-held light. Such love in solid wood! Taken from the hillsides and carved in silence, they have the vibrant stillness of those who made them. Engulfed by the past they have been neglected, but through smoke and darkness they are like the flowers we have seen growing through the dust of eroded slopes, their slowly opening faces turned toward the mountain. Carved in devotion, their eyes have softened through age and their mouths curve through delight of the carver's hand. If only our own faces would allow the invisible carver's hand to bring the deep grain of love to the surface. If only we knew as the carver knew, how the flaws in the wood led his searching chisel to the very core, we would smile too and not need faces immobilized by fear and the weight of things undone. When we fight with our failings, we ignore the entrance to the shrine itself and wrestle with the guardian, fierce figure on the side of good. And as we fight our eyes are hooded with grief and our mouths are dry with pain. If only we could give ourselves to the blows of the carver's hands, the lines in our faces would be the trace lines of rivers feeding the sea where voices meet, praising the features of the mountain and the cloud and the sky. Our faces would fall away until we, growing younger toward death every day, would gather all our flaws in celebration to merge with them perfectly, impossibly, wedded to our essence, full of silence from the carver's hands. -from David Whyte: Essentials
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Yes a favorite...trusting the carver's hands...Gratitude for your wisdom, David, and for this site.
One of my favorite of David's poems. Each time it resurfaces it meets me face to face with what I need. A need and a knowing to let my defenses down so the innocence can enter