Everything is Waiting for You

Photo by Captivating Woman here I found this amazing photo here by this big-hearted mother with a large-measure of faith and positive-thinking. She sounds like a great mom! (I found her because of Akhtar Wasim Dar Sahib's My Page on Web site profile) Here's what her daughter posted under her self-portrait from a wise writer: "the first step is that we really should want to unearth God in our midst...[to] let the mundane become the edge of glory, and find the extraordinary in the ordinary." By Esther de Waal

I attended a poet's workshop and poetry reciting Saturday and found the encouragement to do just what this Esther recommended...here is one of the poems which Mr. Whyte recited - his own. How can we make this title true - or rather LET this deep truth become more true - not only for ourselves yet for others too?

EVERYTHING IS WAITING FOR YOU
By the Irish-internationally famous poet, David Whyte

Your great mistake is to act the drama
as if you were alone. As if life
were a progressive and cunning crime
with no witness to the tiny hidden
transgressions. To feel abandoned is to deny
the intimacy of your surroundings. Surely,
even you, at times, have felt the grand array;
the swelling presence, and the chorus, crowding
out your solo voice. You must note
the way the soap dish enables you,
or the window latch grants you freedom.
Alertness is the hidden discipline or familiarity.
The stairs are your mentor of things
to come, the doors have always been there
to frighten you and invite you,
and the tiny speaker in the phone
is your dream-ladder to divinity.

Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into
the conversation. The kettle is singing
even as it pours you a drink, the cooking pots
have left their arrogant aloofness and
seen the good in you at last. All the birds
and creatures of the world are unutterably
themselves. Everything is waiting for you.

And here are some lines from the one with which he ended the session which was especially meaningful to me in terms of letting go and letting the faith of ages and the Creator behind all that is genuine and of love help us in our journeys to build those interfaith bridges and cut through not only the rigidness of so much of our boundaries - so many of our dogmas but also to know there is the witnessing of the "silent ones" to our plight and sustenance through the LOVE which holds us all:

So here then are the excerpted lines which struck me from Whyte's from his poem, "The Faces at Braga":

"the old shrine room waits in silence...

above the door, the terrible figure
fierce eyes demanding, "Will you step through?"

We...see the faces in meditation,
a hundred faces carved above...

Such love in solid wood...
they have the vibrant stillness of those who made them...

Carved in devotion
their eyes have softened throgh age
and their mouths curve through delight of the carver's hand.

If only our own faces would allow the invisible carver's hand
to bring the deep grain of love to the surface.

If only we knew as the carver knew, how the flaws
in the wood led his searching chisel to the very core,

We would smile too
and not need faces immobilized
by fear and the weight of things undone...

If only we could give ourselves
to the blows of the carver's hands,
the lines in our faces would be the trace lines of rivers

feeding the sea
where voices meet, praising the features
of the mountain, and the cloud, and he sky...

until we, growing younger toward death
every day, would gather all our flaws in celebration...

full of silence from the carver's hands.

END

(Another photo from top of the Captivating Woman site mentioned above)