It doesn’t interest me if there is one God or many gods. I want to know if you belong or feel abandoned, if you can know despair or see it in others,… - David Whyte

THE WELL

Be thankful now for having arrived,
for the sense of having drunk from a well,
for remembering the long drought
that preceded your arrival and the years
walking in a desert landscape of surfaces
looking for a spring hidden from you so long
that even wanting to find it now had gone
from your mind until you only remembered
the hard pilgrimage that brought you here,
the thirst that caught in your throat;
the taste of a world just-missed
and the dry throat that came from a love
you remembered but had never fully wanted
for yourself, until finally after years making
the long trek to get here it was as if your whole
achievement had become nothing but thirst itself.

But the miracle had come simply
from allowing yourself to know
that you had found it, that this time
someone walking out into the clear air
from far inside you had decided not to walk
past it any more; the miracle had come
at the roadside in the kneeling to drink
and the prayer you said, and the tears you shed
and the memory you held and the realization
that in this silence you no longer had to keep
your eyes and ears averted from the place
that could save you, that you had been given
the strength to let go of the thirsty dust laden
pilgrim-self that brought you here, walking
with her bent back, her bowed head
and her careful explanations.

No, the miracle had already happened
when you stood up, shook off the dust
and walked along the road from the well,
out of the desert toward the mountain,
as if already home again, as if you deserved
what you loved all along, as if just
remembering the taste of that clear cool
spring could lift up your face and set you free.

The pursuit of the self is the pursuit of that part of us not defined by our worries and anxieties. But this pursuit begins only by admitting that human anxiety is endless and to be expected. These waves of existential anxiety may knock down the surface self, but there is another, deeper self with a larger perspective that was never knocked down at all. The pursuit of the self is the pursuit of this non-self, one large enough to hold the necessary losses of a human life.

What we see as risk and foolhardiness on the outside can seem more like a constant cohesive drive on the inside that holds to priorities that cannot be discerned by others because they reside in a far too private chamber of personal experience to be shared easily. To dare everything is not necessarily to travel off, but often the opposite, to have faith in a foundation you have discovered in life and which, though it is difficult to describe, even to yourself, you refuse to relinquish.