From the Mountain

FROM THE MOUNTAIN

From the mountain, the earth stood revealed,
not only by its beckoning and endless forms,
not only in the way my body stood at last
at the center of that endless, radiating, horizon,
but for this: that I had understood something
beneath all understanding, that I had touched
the untouchable and unspoken freedom
where every sense of liberty begins, that every path
descending from that high and rocky eminence now
led where every previous fear refused to go,
not out from me, to every far horizon, but inward
from each and every single edge of the world I saw,
returning, like a living light, into the very center
of my body. Something that had once been mine,
now broken open at its center like a sky, opened
and generous to everything that could live
beneath it. My new sense of self suspended
like passing, light-filled clouds, my voice as patient
as the rain, giving life to every fallow ear,
and every fallow field, my inward sense of deep affection
for every blessed living creature, like the sunlight
of an earned forgiveness, forgiveness for the difficult
way that each of us must come, and for all the ways
it is always so hard for us to love, or speak that love,
or be that flowing sense of giving
and happy receiving, like a river or a lake or the music
of falling water, going home merely by following
the beautiful gravitational invitation to keep falling,
so hard for us to hear the rain that way, just
now descending on the mountain, or in our city streets,
gathering to itself, secretly and patiently,
and moment by moment, the source of every stream,
and always, always, just beyond our understanding,
from every single mountain and river and the tiniest
almost hidden, onward stream, the ocean beyond,
growing daily, with every single generous drop.

– David Whyte –

Photo Credit: Rohit Nandon, Amadablam Expedition, Nepal, on Unsplash