Essentials

David Whyte is one of the most powerful poets currently writing in the English language. I reviewed his last book of poems - The Bell and the Blackbird - as well as his Consolations in these pages. This book is slightly different, consisting as it does of prose and poems with commentaries to explain the context, and it is edited by his wife Gayle, who writes that his words 'create an opening for all of us to find our own way into a sense of ground and home in our bodies and experiences, while casting a larger horizon to move into our future all at once.' How do we inhabit our unique being in the course of life, where we are bridges between the invisible and the visible, darkness and light, inner and outer? Some of the eloquent prose pieces towards the end plumb the depths of the human condition in terms of closeness, friendship, heartbreak and despair. David sees despair as 'a necessary seasonal state of repair, a temporary healing absence', which brings a different perspective, while heartbreak 'begins the moment we are asked to let go but cannot' - it is nevertheless we mature, 'and maybe the very essence of being human, or being on the journey from here to there, and of coming to care deeply for we find along the way.'

Here are some beautiful lines from The House of Belonging:

This is the bright home

in which I live,

this is where

I ask

my friends

to come,

this is where I want

to love all the things

it has taken me so long

to learn to love.

This is the temple

of my adult aloneness

and I belong

to that aloneness

as I belong to my life.

There is no house

like the house of belonging.