Thoor Anu

like a door you did not realize was already open...

You tell yourself you’re going to the cliff, but actually, you’re going to meet the ocean.

Just as we have territories beyond our understanding in the world that surrounds us, we also have a line inside us below which it is difficult to drop or explore. Every human life is a wild conversation between the horizons outside us that draw us on and an inner horizon that often first presents itself as troubledness. All of our great contemplative traditions assert that at our core is an inner seam of knowledge or understanding of all the patterns that constellate around us – in the Zen tradition this is our ‘true nature’ or our ‘pearl of great price’, in the Romantic poetic tradition, it is ‘the primary imagination’, in the Christian mystic tradition, ‘the cloud of unknowing’; the unknowable place of origin inside us which always asks to be known and the center around which our whole reality orbits and constellates. But the boundary between the difficulties of our outer lives and this deep, calm, rested, centeredness, like the boundary between opposing currents of water, always takes the form of a difficult, stormy, wild and troubled edge.

When the first really wild invitation to this troubled edge is made to us: when we first intuit that it might be possible to go where we want to go and when we first allow ourselves to experience what the fullness of a human life might look like, we almost always turn our faces away; it is almost always declined at first, even if just for a moment, before we turn our faces back towards it again and allow ourselves to look and allow ourselves to see and feel what is happening. This choice to look again, and not to turn our face away, this act of volition in a human life – of looking to the place where the ocean arrives on our shore – to the wilder edge of our understanding, is the act of waking up. It doesn't matter how humble and narrow an awakening it is – just the act of noticing something other than ourselves, something other than our own opinions, or the way we've described the dead-end of our existence, can be enough to not only wake, but to start a sincere journey toward something for which we long.

Photo: ©David Whyte

THOOR ANU

You did not know you had come
to meet the ocean,

thinking the cliff edge
had everything you’d need,

but when you stared into
the deep vault

of blue from which the revelation
came

and you heard the drumbeat
or arriving water

and looked into
the bowl

of waves and breaking foam,
and sat there stunned

and numb in the underbelly
of the turning world

the vision
was immediate,

a ghost-like far-in horizon
come to meet the sea

an anchored, internal origination
equal to the sway of moon

or ocean or even the wind itself
blowing in from nowhere

an interior
living the edge as center

and the pulse of two great hearts,
beating together,

with the waves’ arrival
and the bird flight

and the choir inside me
singing with the ocean,

the rising inward tide
a lifting and a washing away

and a first footing,
in some terra incognita,

a castaway sense of self,
once wrested and blown away,

now strangely re-ordered and restored
like a fulcrum

from which all movement
could come,

like a door you did not realize
was already open,

like a robust and gifted
helplessness,

a low, mounting ocean roar
growing from within,

an elemental undoing
you’d carry with you

in the city street
or the plane ride home,

still newly inhabited
in the small hours

of the quiet night or the hubbub
of a crowded room,

as if everything felt there
is happening still

as an anticipation
a slow,

rolling arrival of waves,
a birthing,

a life delineated.  Before and after
Thoor Anu.

	-from Pilgrim