A Contemplative Moment: "Anguish" by David Whyte

 ANGUISH 

is the emblem of our helpless love, felt fully in every cell of the body; felt fully until it overflows, in a cry, in tears in words that try to negate, powerlessly, what is occurring. Anguish is our foundational cry against the unjust taking away of what we feel should be forever ours.

Anguish is a word that is a cry in itself: carrying the sound of the body feeling at last what it has all along needed to feel: a physical pain running right through our core and turned by the voice into the sound of pain itself, a pain we often previously could not imagine, an agony that is accompanied by the shock of absolute helplessness, a helplessness which is perhaps the very hallmark of human vulnerability itself, and that separates it from all the other manifold pains in a human life we have words to describe. Anguish is a force that racks and inhabits a suddenly surprised and now fully vulnerable, mind and body. But anguish fully felt is also the first stop on the road to recovery and healing.

Helplessness and the pains of helplessness are abiding companions to the experience of being human: the nurse by the dying child's bedside, having exhausted all remedies; the parent witnessing a teenager's first heartbreak, all of us in this world today, scrolling through the news, seeing the bombed-out homes of innocent, everyday people. We are made to experience both love and loss and an extraordinarily deep, bodily, everyday level and it may be that without helplessness we cannot experience love or loss fully and properly: Anguish is the last fully felt measure of our care.

Feeling real, helpless, emotional pain, is also an entrance into the fully real and the fully felt and is an annunciation that we are actually paying attention at last -- both to what is affecting us and the depth to which we are so movingly affected --anguish means we have finally felt and fully understood not only the true depth and foundational nature of our own suffering but the heartbreak that lies in every other human life we have ever touched or accompanied. Anguish is the doorway through which our personal suffering meets all the griefs that are shared by the world.

Anguish is only entered fully through the door of powerlessness in the absolute physical sense of helplessness. Anguish cannot be simulated: it is not only a measure of our care for others but the inability to know how or when or if it is possible to help, anguish is the very physical incarnation of our sense of compassion brought to ground at last, in the suffering body of the world -- and in real anguish our body reciprocates -- refusing to eat, losing weight, sitting alone, refusing to go out the door, full of the tremors and vulnerabilities that have accompanied human beings since the beginning of conscious time, vulnerabilities that at times seemed to arise from nowhere. 

Anguish tells us that our deep sense of care has entered the timeless and the untouchable, that we have, for the moment, given up on solutions; stopped offering easy answers and let go of our previous, false sureties -- Anguish tells us we have finally decided to enter fully into the pain of our loss, or the pain of another.

The helpless pain at the center of grief is the soul's annunciation that we might have arrived at suffering's essential core, where there is no ready way forward, no remedy for our suffering selves, no cure for a suffering loved one, or it seems anything to be done about our distraught world.

Anguish is always waiting for us: beyond our refusing to care, or our unwillingness to feel fully how helpless we often are to help another, either those intimate to our lives or those suffering at a distance. Anguish is one of the most difficult qualities for human beings to enter because it is meant to be felt whether we have answers or not.

Anguish has its own sense of timing in both concentrating and inviting us to experience its pain, at what feels like a cellular level and then, soberingly, anguish stays longer than we would want and seems to have its own incredibly slow way of moving on. It seems not to move on in fact, until we have fully imbibed its painful instruction of how much we feel and how much we care.

Anguish is the act of finally allowing the transforming fire of care in the heart to rage fully at last, our defenses burnt away by the consuming flame of our helpless love, where, at the center of that fire, we feel our grief and loss to its very core and where grief, in its own timeless, unfathomable way, is allowed to slowly become its own cure.

Angish fully felt and fully articulated in its helplessness, becomes in that articulation, the threshold where our private incurable, unspoken grief turns to public, passionate remedy. Anguish is the true common hidden, a priori foundation to our speaking out for others in this world, even those who seem to have hurt us, anguish is the only true ground we can stand upon to do any useful, charitable, philanthropic work.

Anguish is not debilitation: anguish fully felt, is a sign that we are fully awake at last, through our own pain, to all the heartbreaking losses and goodbyes involved in the drama of a human life, anguish tells us we are getting ready to embrace, or are even now, against our will, willing to embrace, what until now could never be embraced, that is: our ability to live fully in this body despite its never ending griefs and wounds, as others live, and have always lived, half helplessly, half trying to help, in the greater body of the suffering world.

by David Whyte in 

Consolations II, The Solace, Nourishment, and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words

Note: I don't put up Contemplative Moments so close together usually, but this had special meaning to me (not least that after a period of profound anguish I received and read this first article in Whyte's now book on Gaudete Sunday). It changed my entire perspective on "anguish" and colored my prayer at Mass that morning. 

Also, of course, it calls attention to David Whyte's new book which is available for the holidays. It is a second volume of Consolations, David's incredibly beautiful and insightful reflections on the meanings of everyday words. These do indeed give nourishment and solace as they call attention to the deep mysteries words serve to mediate and open us to, ther mysteries we each are called to live if we are to be fully human to and for one another. All good wishes for a wonderful "Gaudete week" in immediate preparation for the Feast of the Nativity of Jesus, in whom God is Emmanuel.

A Contemplative Moment: Vulnerability (Reprise)

Vulnerability 

is not a weakness, a passing indisposition, or something we can arrange to do without, vulnerability is the underlying, ever present abiding undercurrent of our natural state. To run from vulnerability is to run from the essence of our nature, the attempt to be invulnerable is the vain attempt to become someone we are not and most especially, to close off our understanding of the grief of others. More seriously, in refusing our vulnerability we refuse the help needed at every turn of our existence and immobilize the essential, tidal and conversational foundations of our identity.

 

To have a temporary, isolated sense of power over all events and circumstances, is a lovely illusionary privilege and perhaps the prime and most beautifully constructed conceit of being human and especially of being youthfully human, but it is a privilege that must be surrendered with that same youth, with ill health, with accident, with the loss of loved ones who do not share our untouchable powers; powers eventually and most emphatically given up as we approach our last breath.

 

The only choice we have as we mature is how we inhabit our vulnerability, how we become larger and more courageous and more compassionate through our intimacy with disappearance, our choice is to inhabit vulnerability as generous citizens of loss, robustly and fully, or conversely, as misers and complainers, reluctant and fearful , always at the gates of existence, but never bravely and completely attempting to enter, never wanting to risk ourselves, never walking fully through the door.

 

by

David Whyte

Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment,

and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words

A Contemplative Moment: Sometimes

Sometimes

by David Whyte

Sometimes

if you move carefully

through the forest

breathing

like the ones

in the old stories

who could cross

a shimmering bed of dry leaves

without a sound,

you come

to a place

where the only task

is to trouble you

with tiny

but frightening requests

conceived out of nowhere

but in this place

beginning to lead everywhere.

Requests to stop what

you are doing right now,

and

to stop what you

are becoming

while you do it,

questions

that can make

or unmake

a life,

questions

that have patiently

waited for you,

questions

that have no right

to go away.

~David Whyte from Everything is Waiting for You

A Contemplative Moment: The Winter of Listening

 

The Winter of Listening

by David Whyte

"No one but me by the fire,

my hands burning

red in the palms while

the night wind carries

everything away outside.

All this petty worry

while the great cloak

of the sky grows dark

and intense

round every living thing.

What is precious

inside us does not

care to be known

by the mind

in ways that diminish

its presence.

What we strive for

in perfection

is not what turns us

into the lit angel

we desire,

what disturbs

and then nourishes

has everything

we need.

What we hate

in ourselves

is what we cannot know

in ourselves but

what is true to the pattern

does not need

to be explained.

Inside everyone

is a great shout of joy

waiting to be born.

Even with the summer

so far off

I feel it grown in me

now and ready

to arrive in the world.

All those years

listening to those

who had

nothing to say.

All those years

forgetting

how everything

has its own voice

to make

itself heard.

All those years

forgetting

how easily

you can belong

to everything

simply by listening.

And the slow

difficulty

of remembering

how everything

is born from

an opposite

and miraculous

otherness.

Silence and winter

has led me to that

otherness.

So let this winter

of listening

be enough

for the new life

I must call my own."

From The House of Belonging

Fourth Sunday of Advent: Vulnerability by David Whyte (Reprised)

Throughout the Gospel of Mark Jesus' invariable title for himself is Son of Man which can be translated as "Son of Humanity" or even "the Human One". One of the things Mark is concerned to show his readers is that Jesus reveals the nature of authentic humanity. Jesus is the One in whom humanity is exhaustively transparent to God. This is one way of seeing how it is he can reveal both the nature of humanity and divinity at the same time. At the heart of this double and paradoxical revelation  stands the critical and peculiar openness to God and to all God wills which we know as obedience and also, a radical vulnerability.  We see this in the creche and we see the same openness in the events of the cross. One of the most wonderful pieces I have read on the nature of vulnerability and its centrality to authentic humanity is the following piece by David Whyte:

[[Vulnerability is not a weakness, a passing indisposition, or something we can arrange to do without, vulnerability is the underlying, ever present abiding undercurrent of our natural state. To run from vulnerability is to run from the essence of our nature, the attempt to be invulnerable is the vain attempt to become someone we are not and most especially, to close off our understanding of the grief of others. More seriously, in refusing our vulnerability we refuse the help needed at every turn of our existence and immobilize the essential, tidal and conversational foundations of our identity.

To have a temporary, isolated sense of power over all events and circumstances, is a lovely illusionary privilege and perhaps the prime and most beautifully constructed conceit of being human and especially of being youthfully human, but it is a privilege that must be surrendered with that same youth, with ill health, with accident, with the loss of loved ones who do not share our untouchable powers; powers eventually and most emphatically given up as we approach our last breath.

The only choice we have as we mature is how we inhabit our vulnerability, how we become larger and more courageous and more compassionate through our intimacy with disappearance, our choice is to inhabit vulnerability as generous citizens of loss, robustly and fully, or conversely, as misers and complainers, reluctant and fearful , always at the gates of existence, but never bravely and completely attempting to enter, never wanting to risk ourselves, never walking fully through the door. (from Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment, and Underlying Meaning of everyday Words)]]

In Christ authentic humanity becomes a reality in our world and in him it becomes a possibility for us as well. It is truly a humanity which does not "fall short" of the dignity to which we are called by God. (Remember hamartia which is translated "sin," literally means, "to miss the mark" and the mark we actually miss is, as noted in recent posts, that of realizing our call to be imago dei and becoming imago christi.) The birth of Jesus marks the coming of this new possibility into our world. As we approach the Feast of the Nativity may we each recommit ourselves to the vulnerability which allows us not only to say yes to God in the way Mary did, but also to grow in the grace and stature of an authentic and self-emptying humanity as did Jesus. 

Best wishes and prayers for a wonderful last week of Advent and a fruitful Christmas! Sister Laurel, Er Dio.

Thanks and Why Did You Reprise the Piece on Solace?

[[Dear Sister Laurel, I wanted to thank you for the piece you put up yesterday by David Whyte. It is really wonderful and I missed it the first time you put it up several years ago. (Maybe I didn't miss it and it didn't really speak to me then, but it did this time!) I know this is a personal question but do you mind telling readers why you put it up again? I don't think you have done that with your "Contemplative Moment" posts so it piqued my curiosity. Is it because of the pandemic? Did you think this was particularly meaningful at this time because of the suffering the world is experiencing? I thought maybe the reason it spoke to me this time was because I really needed consolation that did justice to my own suffering and this piece did that. Sometimes what you write makes me think you know me and just what I need! I am going to get David Whyte's book!]]

Many thanks for your comments and questions. Yes, David Whyte is a really wonderful writer and what he has to say is rooted in a deep wisdom which is only gained through experience. I think you will love his book; I have posted several passages (definitions) from it over the years and it confirms for me that quite often we need to spend more time thinking about the words we use too blithely or facilely. Consolation (and/or solace) are among these. 

For instance, in spirituality people speak of experiencing consolations and usually they mean by that that somehow God did something "pleasant" or pleasurable for them in prayer, and sometimes they will mean that something that happened in prayer eased their pain and made them feel better. Thus, they will speak of "sweet consolations" and play these off against "bitter desolations" --- where desolations are unpleasant and, at least momentarily, make one feel worse. But in Ignatian spirituality these words are not so easily defined in this sort of black and white way. Instead, what Ignatius meant by a consolation was anything that helps us grow closer to God (and our deepest selves), and desolation is anything which does the opposite. A consolation in this sense might be immensely painful; it might entail serious struggle and various lesser forms of death (or even death itself), while a desolation might be deceptively pleasant when in reality it draws us away from God, and so, away from the very source of life and meaning which is the ground of real happiness or beatitude. David Whyte's piece on solace understands the complex dynamics of these words and captures them very very well.

So why did I reprise this piece? In the Scripture class I am teaching on the Gospel of Mark we had finished the first half of the Gospel, the portion that includes Jesus' non-stop "campaign" through Galilee and environs, his seemingly unceasing miracles, exorcisms, teaching, and his calling and missioning of his disciples/Apostles. This is the story Mark tells in a breathless way, much as an excited 4 year old might recount the story of Christmas morning or a beginning writer just discovering conjunctions might link sentences together with "and" after "and" after "and". This section concludes with Jesus' transfiguration and Peter's compromised profession of Jesus as the Christ or anointed One of God and Jesus' instruction on his death. As Jesus and his disciples move towards Jerusalem and the cross, the first story of the second half of the Gospel (Mark 9:14-29) is Jesus' last recounted exorcism, the healing of the boy with epilepsy which occurs against the backdrop of the disciples' failure to do this and the boy's Father's request to Jesus to heal his son if he can. 

I have never taught this story before and, because of my own seizure disorder, it has always been a difficult one for me. I have tended not to spend a lot of time with it, but now I had to teach it and that meant understanding the story in terms of Mark's Gospel, why it is placed where it is in the text, and attending to what Jesus says about the disciples' failure and the place of prayer in the successful healing. As part of this I especially had to be ready to deal with my own identity as a woman of prayer and the importance of suffering in discipleship (because of the story's context); I needed to do this in light of my own struggles with continued seizures.  Consequently, I spent more than two weeks with the story, reading commentaries, journaling, praying with it (lectio, etc.), and using a couple of sessions with my spiritual director to explore all of this and particularly the way the story affected me. Central to this period was recognizing and articulating the questions characterizing my own struggle to be myself in the face of competing gifts and limitations. Especially I had to pose some sharp questions to God, questions I had never specifically asked Him (unlike the exchange that occurs in the dialog between Jesus and the blind man in the story of the healing of Bartimaeus which ends the section in Mark 10:46-52!!); the process was both incredibly painful and healing for me. Thus, the following paragraph was timely and particularly powerful:

To look for solace is to learn to ask fiercer and more exquisitely pointed questions, questions that reshape  our identities and our bodies and our relation to others. Standing in loss but not overwhelmed by it we become useful and generous and compassionate and even amusing companions for others. But solace also asks us very direct and forceful questions. Firstly, how will you bear the inevitable that is coming to you? And how will you endure it through the years? And above all, how will you shape a life equal to and as beautiful and as astonishing as a world that can birth you, bring you into the light, and then just as you are beginning to understand it, take you away?

A second reason had to do with several conversations I had with a writer for the New York Times. (More about this later.) We were talking about eremitical life and the place of solitude in a truly human life, but also, yes, there were links to the pandemic and the added dimensions of solitude so frequently forced upon people as a result. Especially, we were talking about what is possible and necessary then with regard to solitude, not only for hermits, but for every human being. I had written some about the place of struggle and even of suffering in growing in one's capacity for compassion and had cited Douglas John Hall's God and Human Suffering where he says: 

[[The question therefore becomes: How can one at the same time acquire sufficient honesty about what needs to be faced, and sufficient hope that facing it would make a difference, to engage in altering the course of our present world towards life and not death?]] a page later he observes that acknowledging suffering is not enough. What is also required is [[ the trust that something --- the life process or Providence or God --- something “enduring,” as Isaiah put it, is able to take into itself all that does not endure, even things that are not, and give them a future that infinitely transcends the bleak promise of their past.]] 

Eremitical solitude combines all the elements needed for sufficient honesty about "what needs to be faced" with a defining orientation to God and God's Providence; together these provide significant hope in the midst of suffering in a way which is profoundly consoling. Above all I recognize my own eremitical life as motivated by the desire and sense of a call that, by virtue of the grace of God, can [[shape a life equal to and as beautiful and as astonishing as a world that can birth (me), and bring (me) into the light.]] So this too was on my mind and in my heart, and David Whyte's piece on Solace helped clarify and contextualize all of this for me personally. However, yes, I certainly believed it would speak to readers during this time.

A Contemplative Moment: Solace (reprised from May 2016)

 

Solace

 

is the art of asking the beautiful question, of ourselves, of the world or of one another, in fiercely difficult and un-beautiful moments. Solace is what we must look for when the mind cannot bear the pain, the loss or the suffering that eventually touches every life and every endeavor, when longing does not come to fruition  in a form we can recognize, when people we know and love disappear, when hope must take a different form than the one we have shaped for it.
 

Solace is not an evasion, nor a cure for our suffering, nor a made up state of mind. Solace is a direct seeing and participation; a celebration of the beautiful coming and going, appearance and disappearance of which we have always been a part. Solace is not meant to be an answer, but an invitation, through the door of pain and difficulty, to the depth of suffering and simultaneous beauty in the world that the strategic mind by itself cannot grasp or make sense of.
 

Solace is a beautiful, imaginative home we make where disappointment can go to be rehabilitated. When life does not in any way add up, we must turn to the part of us that has never wanted a life of simple calculation. Solace is found in allowing the body's innate wisdom to come to the fore, the part of us that already knows it is mortal and must take its leave like everything else, and leading us, when the mind cannot bear what it is seeing or hearing, to the birdsong in the tree above our heads, even as we are being told of a death, each note an essence of mourning; of the current of a life moving on, but somehow, also, and most beautifully, carrying, bearing, and even celebrating into the life we have just lost. A life we could not see or appreciate until it was taken from us

 

To be consoled is to be invited onto the terrible ground of beauty upon which our inevitable disappearance stands, to a voice that does not sooth falsely, but touches the epicenter of our pain or articulates the essence of our loss, and then emancipates us into both life and death as an equal birthright.
 

To look for solace is to learn to ask fiercer and more exquisitely pointed questions, questions that reshape  our identities and our bodies and our relation to others. Standing in loss but not overwhelmed by it we become useful and generous and compassionate and even amusing companions for others. But solace also asks us very direct and forceful questions. Firstly, how will you bear the inevitable that is coming to you? And how will you endure it through the years? And above all, how will you shape a life equal to and as beautiful and as astonishing as a world that can birth you, bring you into the light, and then just as you are beginning to understand it, take you away?

by David Whyte in

Consolations, The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words

A Contemplative Moment: Silence

Silence

 

is frightening, an intimation of the end, the grave yard of fixed identities. real silence puts any present understanding to shame, orphans from certainty; leads us beyond the well-known and accepted reality and confronts us with the unknown and previously unacceptable conversation about to break in upon our lives. Silence does not end skepticism but makes it irrelevant. Belief or unbelief or any previously rehearsed story meets the wind in the trees, the distant horn in the busy harbor, or the watching eye and listening ear of a puzzled loved one.

 

In silence, essence speaks to us of essence and asks for a kind of unilateral disarmament, our own essential nature slowly emerging as the defended periphery atomizes and falls apart. as the busy edge dissolves we begin to join the conversation through the portal of a present unknowing, robust vulnerability, revealing in the way we listen, a different ear, a more perceptive eye. an imagination refusing to come too early to a conclusion, and belonging to a different person than the one who first entered the quiet.

 

Out of the quiet emerges the sheer incarnational presence of the world, a presence that seems to demand a moving internal symmetry in the one breathing and listening equal to its own breathing listening elemental powers.

 

To become deeply silent is not to become still but to become tidal and seasonal, a coming and going that has its own inimitable, essential character, a story not fully told, like the background of the sea, or the rain falling or the river going on, out of sight, out of our lives. reality met on its own terms demands absolute presence, and absolute giving away, an ability to live on equal terms with the fleeting and the eternal, the hardly touchable and the fully possible, a full bodily appearance, a rested giving in and giving up; another identity braver, more generous and more here than the one looking hungrily for the easy, unearned answer.

 

by David Whyte,

Consolations, Nourishment, and Underlying

Meaning of Everyday Words

A Contemplative Moment: Vulnerability

 

Vulnerability

 

is not a weakness, a passing indisposition, or something we can arrange to do without, vulnerability is the underlying, ever present abiding undercurrent of our natural state. To run from vulnerability is to run from the essence of our nature, the attempt to be invulnerable is the vain attempt to become someone we are not and most especially, to close off our understanding of the grief of others. More seriously, in refusing our vulnerability we refuse the help needed at every turn of our existence and immobilize the essential, tidal and conversational foundations of our identity.

 

To have a temporary, isolated sense of power over all events and circumstances, is a lovely illusionary privilege and perhaps the prime and most beautifully constructed conceit of being human and especially of being youthfully human, but it is a privilege that must be surrendered with that same youth, with ill health, with accident, with the loss of loved ones who do not share our untouchable powers; powers eventually and most emphatically given up as we approach our last breath.

 

The only choice we have as we mature is how we inhabit our vulnerability, how we become larger and more courageous and more compassionate through our intimacy with disappearance, our choice is to inhabit vulnerability as generous citizens of loss, robustly and fully, or conversely, as misers and complainers, reluctant and fearful , always at the gates of existence, but never bravely and completely attempting to enter, never wanting to risk ourselves, never walking fully through the door.

 

by

David Whyte

Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment,

and Underlying Meaning of everyday Words

A Contemplative Moment: Courage

 

Courage

 

is a word that tempts us to think outwardly, to run bravely against opposing fire, to do something under besieging circumstances. . .

 

Courage is the measure of our heartfelt participation with life, with another, with a community, a work, a future. To be courageous is not necessarily to go anywhere or do anything except to make conscious those things we already feel deeply and then to live through the unending vulnerabilities of those consequences.

 

To be courageous is to seat our feelings deeply in the body and in the world: to live up to and into the necessities of relationships that often already exist, with things we find we already care deeply about: with a person, a future, a possibility in society, or with an unknown that begs us on and always has begged us on. To be courageous is to stay close to the way we are made.

 

The French philosopher Camus used to tell himself quietly to live to the point of tears, not as a call for maudlin sentimentality, but as an invitation to the deep privilege of belonging and the way belonging affects us, shapes us and breaks our heart at a fundamental level. It is a fundamental dynamic of human incarnation to be moved by what we feel, as if surprised by the actuality and privilege of love and affection and its possible loss. Courage is what love looks like when tested by the simple everyday necessities of being alive. . ..

 

by David Whyte in

Consolations, The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words

A Contemplative Moment: Aloneness

 

Alone

 

is a word that stands by itself, carrying the austere, solitary beauty of its own meaning even as it is spoken to another. It is a word that can be felt at the same time as an invitation to depth and as an imminent threat, as in 'all alone', with its returned echo of abandonment. 'Alone' is a word that rings with strange finality, especially when contained in that haunting aggregate, 'left all alone', as if the state once experienced begins to define and engender its own inescapable world. The first step in spending time alone is to admit how afraid of it we are.

 

Being alone is a difficult discipline: a beautiful and difficult sense of being solitary is always the ground from which we step into a contemplative intimacy with the unknown, but the first portal of aloneness is often experienced as a gateway to alienation, grief and abandonment. To find ourselves alone or to be left alone is an ever present, fearful and abiding human potentiality of which we are often unconsciously deeply afraid.

 

To be alone for any length of time is to shed an outer skin. The body is inhabited in a different way when we are alone than when we are with others. Alone, we live with our bodies as a question rather than a statement.

 

The permeability of being alone asks us to reimagine ourselves, to become impatient with ourselves, to tire of the same old story and then slowly hour by hour, to start to tell the story in a different way as other parallel ears, ones we were previously unaware of, begin to listen to us more carefully in the silence. For a solitary life to flourish, even if it is only for a few precious hours, aloneness asks us to make a friend of silence, and just as importantly, to inhabit that silence in our own particular way, to find our very own way into our own particular and even virtuoso way of being alone.

 

To inhabit silence in our aloneness is to stop telling the story altogether. To begin with, aloneness always leads to rawness and vulnerability, to a fearful simplicity, to not recognizing and to not knowing, to the wish to find any company other than that not knowing, unknown self, looking back at us in the silent mirror.

 

One of the elemental dynamics of self-compassion is to understand our deep reluctance to be left to ourselves. Aloneness begins in puzzlement at our own reflection, transits through awkwardness and even ugliness at what we see, and culminates one appointed hour or day, in a beautiful unlooked for surprise, at the new complexion beginning to form, the slow knitting together of an inner life, now exposed to air and light. . . .

 

from Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment, and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words by David Whyte