The Gleam

the place you should have gone all those years ago

Photo: © David Whyte

The Gleam

Sometimes,
in the midst
of every difficult
and everyday
awkward
way you try to
make your
onward way,

sometimes 
sitting down
at the edge
of everything
that has made you
too tired
to take
another step

there’s that
caught sight,
now here,
now gone

of a half imagined 
wavering light
just among
the trees

just a gleam
or a wisp
of white gold
in the dying sun

a strange kind
of beckoning,

an ache
outlined
so intimately
as it is,
against
all of the doings
you have
labeled
so lovingly
as sins,

the place you
should have gone
all those years ago
still, it seems,
willing
to invite you again,

simpler this time,
not too far away
touchable now,
and within reach

just a single step
on the other side
of what you always
come to call
in the end,
forgiveness.


 -from Still Possible

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One of the very necessary dynamics in life is to be able to look at the way we might feel distant from the life we want to live – and the way that sense of distance actually seems to beckon us. The ability to feel the absolute physicality of how we feel distant from what we want with all the ways we feel close to those same wants: how holding closeness and distance both together in our body brings us to another place – a deeper conversation which strangely, to begin with, is a place of non-articulation, but one from which a new and real ability to speak will not only grow but find a way to be heard in the world. - DW

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