#david-whyte — Public Fediverse posts

Seeking language large enough

I really enjoyed this (it’s a rebroadcast from 2016) episode of On Being with David Whyte.

David Whyte is an English poet and philosopher, born to a Yorkshire father and an Irish mother, who trained as a marine zoologist and worked as a naturalist guide in the Galápagos before returning to poetry full time. He is best known for The Heart Aroused: Poetry and the Preservation of the Soul in Corporate America, and for Consolations, his book of essays on the underlying meanings of everyday words. In this 2016 conversation, he speaks about what he calls the conversational nature of reality — the frontier between what you think is you and what you think is not you — and about loss, vulnerability, aloneness, genius, and the strange work of bringing poetry into corporate leadership. Threaded through is his friendship with the late John O’Donohue and the grief of losing him. He recites four of his poems along the way.

David Whyte — Seeking Language Large Enough

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Poet and Philosopher David Whyte on Anger, Forgiveness, and What Maturity Really Means

http://web.brid.gy/r/https://www.themarginalian.org/2026/06/11/david-whyte-consolations-anger-forgiveness-maturity/

Love Against Probability

https://web.brid.gy/r/https://www.themarginalian.org/2025/11/24/love-probability/

David Whyte on the Relationship Between Anxiety and Intimacy via The Marginalian

It takes a long time to know a person — to unbutton the costume of personality and unlace the corset of coping mechanisms in order to touch the naked soul. It is a process delicate and difficult, riven by anxiety and absolutely terrifying to both, requiring therefore great courage and great vulnerability — a process the hard-won product of which we call intimacy. “There is no terror like that of being known,”

http://welchwrite.com/blog/2025/10/31/david-whyte-on-the-relationship-between-anxiety-and-intimacy-via-the-marginalian-shared/

#anxiety #book #intimacy #davidwhyte #relationships #communication #life #living #shared

Ritual

Ritual is not the re-enactment of a past event. It is the re-enactment of meaning.

~ David Whyte

slip:4a1545.

A real twist on Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken" in David Whyte's "Not Taken": https://davidwhyte.substack.com/p/not-taken?publication_id=1377056&post_id=145306915&isFreemail=true&r=2t69m&triedRedirect=true.

#poetry #poem #TodaysPoem #PoemAADay #RobertFrost #DavidWhyte #roads #choices

https://davidwhyte.substack.com/p/blessing-for-one-who-blessed #poetry #DavidWhyte

#poetry #apoemaday #DavidWhyte #love #life

People say the #climatecatastrophe and #culturewars are exhausting. So true. I'm contemplating the advice #DavidSteindlRast gave poet #DavidWhyte. He said, "The antidote to exhaustion isn't necessarily rest. The antidote to exhaustion is wholeheartedness."

Sweet Darkness
David Whyte

When your eyes are tired
the world is tired also.

When your vision has gone,
no part of the world can find you.

Time to go into the dark
where the night has eyes
to recognize its own.

There you can be sure
you are not beyond love.

The dark will be your home
tonight.

The night will give you a horizon
further than you can see.

You must learn one thing.
The world was made to be free in.

Give up all the other worlds
except the one to which you belong.

Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet
confinement of your aloneness
to learn

anything or anyone
that does not bring you alive

is too small for you.

#DavidWhyte #alone #solitude #contemplation #mindfulness #authenticity #poetry #poet #poetrycommunity #writer #writingcommunity #poem #poetrylovers #poems

"Being alone is a difficult discipline: a beautiful and difficult sense of being solitary is always the ground from which we step into a contemplative intimacy with the unknown, but the first portal of aloneness is often experienced as a gateway to alienation, grief and abandonment. To find ourselves alone or to be left alone is an ever present, fearful and abiding human potentiality of which we are often unconsciously and deeply afraid.

The permeability of being alone asks us to re-imagine ourselves, to become impatient with ourselves, to tire of the same old story and then slowly hour by hour, to start to tell the story in a different way as other parallel ears, ones we were previously unaware of begin to listen to us more carefully in the silence, and just as importantly, to inhabit that silence in our own particular way, to find our very own way into our own particular and even virtuoso way of being alone.

To inhabit silence in our aloneness is to stop telling the story altogether. To begin with, aloneness always leads to rawness and vulnerability, to a fearful simplicity, to not recognizing and to not knowing, to the wish to find any company other than that not knowing, unknown self, looking back at us in the silent mirror.

One of the elemental dynamics of self-compassion is to understand our deep reluctance to be left to ourselves."

David Whyte

#DavidWhyte #alone #solitude #contemplation #mindfulness #authenticity

https://grateful.org/resource/everything-is-waiting-for-you/ #poetry #DavidWhyte

This THIS THISSSSSSS

RT @[email protected]

‘We withdraw not to disappear, but to find another ground from which to see; a solid ground from which to step, and from which to speak again, in a clear, rested, embodied voice. Our life as a suddenly emphatic statement and one from which we do not wish to withdraw.’ #DavidWhyte

🐦🔗: https://twitter.com/tanyashadrick/status/1377744843066241031

RT @[email protected]

‘We withdraw not to disappear, but to find another ground from which to see; a solid ground from which to step, and from which to speak again, in a clear, rested, embodied voice. Our life as a suddenly emphatic statement and one from which we do not wish to withdraw.’ #DavidWhyte

🐦🔗: https://twitter.com/tanyashadrick/status/1377744843066241031