[CitizensTruth] FW: David Whyte

[Robin Migalla]

Hi Everyone,

A friend sent this to me yesterday, and I thought it too beautiful not to 
share.

Cheers,
Robin

-----Original Message-----
Sent:	Saturday, December 13, 2008 17:04
Subject:	David Whyte


Hello Everyone,

This is the loveliest and wisest thing I've seen about the recession. 
 David Whyte is an English poet and apparently a prophet too.

 Thoughts on the Creativity of Winter
Outside my window the wintry English fields spread, as they have for 
centuries to the dark, smoke blue line of woods that limit the horizon of 
the valley. A bright fire burns in the grate to my left, while outside I 
can hear the call of a barn owl cutting the still, even air.
All is exactly as it has been for many a hundred year in these Cotswold 
hills where I happily find myself this winter's day. Everything from 
horizon to horizon is eternal and quiet and seemingly unchangeable - 
except, that is, for one tiny but extraordinary portal I can open on this 
laptop to a parallel world of web-borne news, a world supposedly more real 
than the quiet one I inhabit this cold but beautiful evening. With a few 
clicks, I can enter an astonishing world of worry, anxiety and for many 
individuals, and indeed whole societies, material hardship, brought on by 
the cessation of credit. Out of the hermetic silence of a quiet winter day 
I can take a few short steps and almost touch the sense of panic and the 
extraordinary breakdown in trust that has stopped the flow of currency from 
one person to another, one bank to another one society to another. It is as 
if the cold hands of this financial season have touched every last monetary 
stream and rivulet, and frozen them over. It is winter here in the 
countryside with all its well-loved beauties, but out in the world of 
money, it is winter with another form of terrible beauty, the winter of 
disappearance, immobility, and the worry fret and anxiety that comes from 
seeming to have very little shelter from its effects.

It is always a trauma for the human psyche when those elements it has 
over-invested itself in at the periphery of life are withdrawn, and the 
spring-like world of growth and opportunity seems to close down, as if the 
old currencies have become worthless while we as yet do not know how to 
value or harvest the following season. But this form of trauma has also 
been seen by many of our great religious, contemplative and artistic 
traditions as an invitation back to another kind of valuation, a return to 
a more internal focus, an opportunity to revive an old friendship with the 
place from which all the peripheries are recognized, priced and named. 
  This internal, alchemical, almost catalytic core of identity-making and 
decision-making has long been associated with the soul of an individual; 
the part of us attempting to belong to the world in the biggest way it can; 
the part that witnesses our outer actions, stirs our conscience and quite 
often seems to be
 at odds with those other parts of us trying to game the system at the 
periphery. It is interesting to think that what may be a financial trauma 
for the surface personality may be a break for freedom for a more serious, 
central core of the psyche, the part that understands its own mortality and 
secretly knows that it will eventually all come to a place where we have to 
give up on all the peripherals anyway, at that unknown, appointed 
crossroads when our particular individual life as we know it, comes to an 
end.

In times of difficulty, it is tempting to think that creativity, vision and 
new possibilities must be put aside simply in order to survive. It is 
tempting, when the financial tide goes out, to act from a sense of 
impoverishment; it easy to feel abandoned when the source and sense of our 
riches are no longer in the summer air but hidden deep in a form of winter 
potentiality. It is always very hard to understand that the world has 
shifted to another axis of generosity; one not so readily recognized. When 
we feel bereft of one form of support we can easily forget that it is 
because we might be meant to put that particular form of comfort aside and 
look to a fiercer more internally grounded stage of our maturity, one that 
might emanate from a simpler but surer ground than the outer sky of mirrors 
and monetary instruments we might have constructed for ourselves in the 
so-called real world.

It also might be surprising to think that there are just as many forms of 
courage and creativity associated with disappearance and doing without; 
just as many satisfying elements of aliveness associated with a winter as 
with spring. This central, core conversation to which we return in each 
succeeding winter is both nourishing and deeply disturbing, it seems 
heedless of any flimsy structures we may have erected, it seems fiery in 
that it burns familiar things away and yet provides another form of warmth 
emanating from a more nested, interior hearth.

In my experience the first necessity of an individual in finding this 
fiery, core conversation is a radical form of simplification. To get to the 
core conversation we have to withdraw from the edges. Whatever expenses we 
have been making at the margins of our lives in terms of emotions, finances 
or time-based commitment must be brought back to the central conversation 
that makes the most sense. Radical simplification often entails a seemingly 
ruthless withdrawal from secondary involvements, i t also involves 
simplifying wants and needs to grant us another form of freedom not 
necessarily involved with the freedom to buy anything we want at any time. 
Arguments for indiscriminate buying to revive the economy are circular and 
lock human beings into a never ending cycle of buying goods that are non 
essential, with everyone encouraged to live beyond their means, to the 
ultimate dismantling of the natural systems that supply those wants in the 
first place. The
 practice of radical simplification, however, might not mean living in a 
desire-less, enlightened state, but simply catching our desires as close to 
the centre of our experience as possible.
Practically, we can catch a need for an expensive new sports car early on 
in the process by buying a second hand version of the same, we can catch it 
even earlier, nearer to the center, by renting one every now and again, 
without having to go to expense of maintaining it, we can catch it very 
close in indeed, by attempting to live out directly the very qualities that 
underlie the desire itself. Without the prop of the car, we might try to 
cultivate a certain air of freedom as if the wind was always in our hair. 
The withdrawal from the literal, over- concretized periphery where 
everything is counterfeiting for something closer in, almost always leaves 
us dealing in another more imaginative currency at the center.
Now that our focus is shifting away from the peripheral bubble of promised 
riches, we are just beginning to be reminded again of the depths of 
poverty, both in the developing world and the United States where the 
social safety net for those in difficulty has been worn almost to nothing. 
But it is exactly this re evaluation of the periphery and the renewed 
emphasis on what is essential that will bring spending back from mere 
baubles to infrastructure and education, back from foreign adventurism to a 
coherent approach to the sources of terror; in the United States especially 
there must be an attempt at a better health care system, a more cohesive, 
less poisonous political conversation and a renewed relationship with a 
world in desperate need for it to return to its foundational ideals.
This new faculty of valuation can be quite disturbing to way we might have 
priced and measured out our life in the recent, unbalanced, heady times. 
The road of radical simplification almost always leads to the door of the 
great and unwanted unknown. The door to begin with seems to open on to 
nothing we at first can recognize. To enter through that door we have to 
cultivate what Suzuki Roshi called beginner?s mind, where we stop having to 
know and name everything in advance and allow ourselves the satisfactions 
of discovery and revelation. In doing this we actually start to re mould 
our identity in the form of the learner and listener. Learning, listening 
and radically simplifying as we go we might have a possibility of opening 
up that catalytic core where very few elements need combine to create a 
great deal of new energy. A decision made from this core has enormous 
leverage on the outer world where we see, hear, work and have 
relationships. This
 internal center appears when the outer peripheries have bankrupted 
themselves, fallen and become a loam that we must plough back to enrich the 
ground. In the depths of winter under the cold night of wind and stars and 
shut off from the garden, we look for those hidden and invisible springs 
that will uncoil, in the still summer air, each new, yet to be imagined 
rose.