What Poet David Whyte says on ending relationships?
“Sometimes everything has to be inscribed across the heavens so you can find the one line already written inside you.”
In his insightful essay on love, the renowned Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh issued a warning: “To love without knowing how to love hurts the person we love.” However, leaving love behind is never simple because it also requires us to leave behind the part of ourselves that did the loving. This is true even when this incremental laceration eventually becomes an irreparable rupture.
Even so, this challenging transition is a necessary component of the human experience and the never-ending learning process that is life for everyone except the extremely fortunate and the extremely foolish. After all, anything worthwhile pursuing is worthwhile failing at, and we fail as we pursue.
The delicate duality of that experience is what English poet and philosopher David Whyte, a man of great insight into life’s complexities, addresses with breathtaking beauty in “The Journey,” found in his altogether exquisite third book of poetry, The House of Belonging, Whyte wrote this poem for a friend who was about to undertake that incredibly difficult yet hopeful act of ending a hurting relationship and rewriting what was once a shared future into a solitary turn toward.
One of the challenges of ending a relationship is not so much leaving the other person since at that point, you are ready to go on, but rather abandoning the dreams that you both shared. And you are aware that you will never, ever again have those specific dreams with that certain tonality and coloration, regardless of who you meet in your life in the future or what kind of bliss you might enjoy with them. There is a beautiful and potent form of grieving there, the final act of letting go, but it also creates room for another kind of reimagining.
THE JOURNEY
Above the mountains
the geese turn into
the light again
Painting their
black silhouettes
on an open sky.
Sometimes everything
has to be
inscribed across
the heavens
so you can find
the one line
already written
inside you.
Sometimes it takes
a great sky
to find that
first, bright
and indescribable
wedge of freedom
in your own heart.
Sometimes with
the bones of the black
sticks left when the fire
has gone out
someone has written
something new
in the ashes of your life.
You are not leaving.
Even as the light fades quickly now,
you are arriving.
The poem is reminiscent of Mary Oliver’s equally inspiring but quite different masterwork of the same name. Whyte is really one of the many people who have been inspired by the Oliver classic, which gets its power from how open-ended but clearly it speaks to various facets of the human experience and is bound together by the urgency of striving for a better life that is achievable.
The way Whyte reads the well-known poem, with his “finally” gasps, “Mend my life!” screams, and draws out that brave reach for a better existence, only heightens its resonance in the area of love.
