Bruce Lee knew this when he admonished that “you will never get any more out of life than you expect,” James Baldwin knew it when he admonished that “you’ve got to tell the world how to treat you if the world tells you how you are going to be treated, you are in trouble,” and Viktor Frankl embodied this in his impassioned insistence on saying “yes” to life.
The stories we tell ourselves about what we are worthy or unworthy of - from the small luxuries of naps and watermelon to the grandest luxury of a passionate creative calling or a large and possible love - are the stories that shape our lives. Two of these poems - “Blessing for Sound” and “Blessing for the Light” - come alive as a ravishment of Irish landscape and music in Whyte’s collaboration with filmmaker Andrew Hinton and composer Owen Ó Súilleabháin for Emergence Magazine.įrom The Bell and the Blackbird by David WhyteĬomplement with Whyte on courage, anger and forgiveness, and his soul-slaking poem about the pathway to true love, then revisit Ronald Johnson’s transcendent prose poem about sound, science, and the soul and filmmaker Andrew Dawson’s tree-inspired visual poem based on Whyte’s lyric reflection on the meaning of closeness.“if you wanted to drown you could, but you don’t because finally after all this struggle and all these years you simply don’t want to any more, you’ve simply had enough of drowning and you want to live and you want to love” BY MARIA POPOVAįew things limit us more profoundly than our own beliefs about what we deserve, and few things liberate us more powerfully than daring to broaden our locus of possibility and self-permission for happiness. That feeling-tone of grateful wonder is what poet and philosopher David Whyte celebrates the “Blessings & Prayers” suite of poems found in his altogether vivifying collection The Bell and the Blackbird ( public library).
It can bless with the surprising cymbal of a robin’s egg out of time and out of place or with the murmuration of a moonlit tree. That feeling-tone can come as symphonic as a total solar eclipse or as quiet as the rising tide. For me, blessedness is a feeling-tone of grateful wonder. (Which might, in the end, be one.)Įven for the unchurched among us, who worship at the altar of reality, blessedness can be a beautiful concept unbaggaged from religion. “Blessedness is within us all,” Patti Smith wrote in yet another century as she contemplated life, death, and love. “Now I will do nothing but listen,” the young Walt Whitman resolved as he pressed his ear against the eternal song of being a century before Aldous Huxley found in the transcendent power of music a portal into the “blessedness lying at the heart of things.”
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