the doorway to simplicity

Giving away, again....

The Doorway to Simplicity:

The doorway to a radical, numinous, simplicity, seems to be reached by the long and difficult path of generosity. Firstly, we are invited, against our will, to unfold our grip and give away what was never ours in the first place: secondly, we are then asked, or at times forced, to let go, of what was once ours, but which we have held to far too long and far too tightly, long beyond its proper season. Thirdly, and lastly, and with great difficulty, we hear the unwanted call to give away those things that have always been ours, but which we somehow managed to love in the wrong way: we are asked to give away people or things we were close to, but people or things we named in the wrong way.

At the end, we are left with is what is actually ours, a living, robust, but hardly identifiable thing, that is a flowing, everyday representation of our essential spirit; a wave form passing through us, a way we hold the everyday conversation of life: in the silence of a room, in the city street, in the office or at an ocean’s edge, but still, an essence we are asked to give away again and again; in the right way, to the right person, or the right place, at the right time; time after time.

In the midst of that last giving we seem to take a step into the numinous doorway of permeability, and are suddenly found ourselves by the world and seemingly, by the light, we become a strange new receiver of the world’s own generosity; we find ourselves being given back to, in the right way, at the right time by the right source; we stand in the living, breathing doorway where giving and taking become one thing.


Thoughts from Avignon: © David Whyte 2013


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