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
© 2022

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