08/24/2020
What forest therapy provides is a space to think allow for deeper thoughts, emotions and inspirations. 🌺🌻💚
SOMETIMES
Sometimes
if you move carefully
through the forest,
breathing
like the ones
in the old stories,
who could cross
a shimmering bed
of leaves
without a sound,
you come
to a place
whose only task
is to trouble you
with tiny
but frightening
requests,
conceived out
of nowhere
but in this place
beginning
to lead everywhere.
Requests to stop what
you are doing right now,
and
to stop what you
are becoming
while you do it,
questions
that can make
or unmake
a life,
questions
that have patiently
waited for you,
questions
that have no right
to go away.
…
SOMETIMES
In ‘David Whyte : Essentials’
Many Rivers Press. January 2020
https://www.amazon.com/David-Whyte-Essentials/dp/1932887504/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=David+Whyte+Essentials&qid=1574706786&s=books&sr=1-1
…
Mist in Buckholt Wood.
Photo © David Whyte
Cotswolds. September 13th 2013
…
Almost all individual and communal transformations take place, especially at the beginning, almost silently, without announcement or declaration that the old ways of living and therefore the ways forward have changed irrevocably. None of us really knew, this January how our world would have changed so irrevocably by this August. ‘Sometimes’ looks at this constant dynamic of sometimes silent, background, seasonal change; the announced and unannounced arrival through trepidation, anticipation and slowly growing understanding that the new season is not only to be faced, but that it has actually been here for a very long time, and has been steering our life often without our participation. As a child I was given a lavishly illustrated book of Native American myths and stories, a book I returned to again and again for years, wearing away the edges of the pages as I did, but out of all the haunting stories and intriguing pictures, one stood out for me, the image of a young boy in a primeval forest being taught by an elder how to cross a piece of broken ground, without making a single sound. I returned to this story repeatedly, I know now out of the child’s intuition that we are all moving silently and unannounced, all transiting and maturing into new territories and new dispensations without the essentials of those transitions ever been explained or spoken; the last line in many respects is the essence of the poet’s work, to work with the questions ‘that have no right to go away’ in the life of an individual, in the life of a relationship or marriage, and in our collective conversations in an increasingly fraught, but increasingly necessary, world-wide society. DW
