Winter 2011-2012
It has been a year in full creative flood: an essay series which has sharpened my mind and created a new and live relationship with a close readership, a novel that I have worked on, thought upon and waited upon until I can just begin to sense the depth in that form, a recent unstoppable surge of new poetry which has been like drinking from a well of fresh, clear water and then on the road, growing, sell-out live audiences around the globe that feel like a crystallization and a culmination of long years of travelling, speaking and reading.
It is strangely disconcerting to be part of a world that seems to be in the throes of a full economic and psychological breakdown while my own work, and the demand for that work seems to be at a flood tide. I have the sense of a privilege, not fully earned, of a gift not deserved, and an intuition that it can only be the result of visible and invisible help and unidentifiable dynamics; dynamics that I have not contributed to properly, that seem to have blessed me and the endeavor, allied to what I have to offer, but independent of and sometimes even despite that strange bundle of contradictions that goes under the name of David Whyte.
This dynamic of circumstances or success in an endeavor having been loaned to us, almost under sufferance, is ancient and familiar and in almost all our inherited cultural mythologies. In the artistic traditions, the unconscious temptation to begin impersonating oneself, to lose sight of the innocence that first set us on the path; to take one of the many doors of self-destruction available to each of us and the possibilities for increasingly less subtle forms of egomania are manifest. In the ancient world, associating oneself with powers that belonged only to the gods, or to God - a very common temptation in the poetic tradition - was always a prelude to psychological disaster, to alcoholism, to addictions of all kinds and to the sweet reflected prison of narcissism.
It seems to me that any path followed with sincerity always has its own particularly beautiful and austere form of despair, but that necessary heartbreak is exactly the axis of vulnerability and humility we must travel to stay true to a course; and it is this very dynamic that keeps our feet on the ground illuminated by the work itself. I have certainly felt a close relationship with that vulnerability and humiliation over the years. Most humbling of all, I now seem to have a circle of enquiry, a readership and a listenership that by listening to me and reading me; by the intentionality of their participation and by their concern in following the maturation of my voice, help me to understand the larger world of which my work is only a contributing part.
I am lucky to have a métier that is self-revealing, humbling, constantly reminding me of the actual contact point with reality that makes a life worthwhile. It is a work full of friendship; friendship with those who wrote before me: an Akhmatova, a Wordsworth or a Neruda; with those who write now: a Jeremy Reid, a Seamus Heaney or a Mary Oliver, but also friendship with the uncounted paths of others represented by their work, and coming full circle, with those un-enumerated millions around the world who are friends of poetry itself.
I am twice blessed to have a first love as a work, but also, ultimately, to see it as no work at all, but as a way of being in the world; a way of holding the conversation of life that is enlarging, generous, deeply satisfying and a full reward in and of itself. Having lived with and understood the privilege and gift of the art, I would write and read and even recite poetry out loud to myself whether I had a single reader or even listener in the world, I would follow the discipline and its attendant triumphs and humiliations whether my name was known or not in any circle large or small, and I would write in the cold of an unheated room and in poor rags just to warm myself by the hearth of revelation and to re-clothe myself in the beauty of self understanding.
In the end, we all come to live in the very humble abode of our own making, and in the end everything has to be given away so that what is real can return. This letter, I realize, is an attempt give away the many manifest gifts that have been given to me over the years, not least by you, a reader and perhaps a listener, to clear the ground for a new season and to have what is real in the work returned again, in a yet to be imagined summer, out of the pale hard ground of this winter’s day.
