Love is the conversation between possible, searing disappointment and a profoundly imagined sense of arrival and fulfillment; how we shape that conve… - David Whyte

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Love is the conversation between possible, searing disappointment and a profoundly imagined sense of arrival and fulfillment; how we shape that conversation is the touchstone of our ability to love in the real inhabited world.

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About David Whyte

David Whyte (born 2 November 1955) is an Anglo-Irish poet.[1][2][3] He has said that all of his poetry and philosophy are based on "the conversational nature of reality".[4] His book The Heart Aroused: Poetry and the Preservation of the Soul in Corporate America (1994) topped the best-seller charts in the United States.

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Additional quotes by David Whyte

In the end comes also our beginning, the ancient sense of a door opening to some final unknown, some invisible voice attempting to help us come to terms with our own disappearance, the hand extended to help us over a horizon equally as mysterious as the one we crossed at our birth.

The antidote to exhaustion is not rest; it's wholeheartedness.

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Working Together

Composed by David Whyte as a dedication to the 777 at the request of Boeing corporation. Whyte wanted to be sure not to write a corporate propaganda piece and hence he drew upon his own fear of flying to write something very meaningful. The idea of travelling 550 miles per hour at 33,000 feet with no visible means of support can be scary. However, we today know that the plane gets its support from the interaction between velocity and the wing shape. Velocity and the aerodynamic shape have existed in nature since time immemorial, but humans only discovered the power of bringing them together only about 140 years. That discovery has allowed us to travel all over the world today. Using this as a metaphor, he wrote about many hidden qualities in ourselves that we may need to bring together to achieve more than we can imagine.

We shape our self
to fit this world
and by the world
are shaped again.

The visible
and the invisible
working together
in common cause,
to produce
the miraculous.

I am thinking of the way
the intangible air
traveled at speed
round a shaped wing
easily
holds our weight.

So may we, in this life
trust
to those elements
we have yet to see
or imagine,
and look for the true
shape of our own self,
by forming it well
to the great
intangibles about us.

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