Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet confinement of your aloneness to learn anything or anyone that does not bring you alive is too small for yo… - 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.

FRIENDSHIP is a mirror to presence and a testament to forgiveness

One of the clichéd human answers to stress and overwork is to increase your speed and your velocity…

The great tragedy of this approach is that you cannot recognize anything or anyone who is not traveling at the same velocity you are and you become a stranger to the slower, longer cycles of existence … and you find it hard to have compassion for anyone [at a slower pace] … you are afraid of stopping and they are reminding you that there is a part of the world that does periodically stops and takes a breath before it moves again. You don’t know who you’d be if you stopped and you get quite resentful … a kind of existential impatience and lack of generosity which comes from stressful approach to work.