Last time I wrote about starting over with our practice - and how that starting over is one of the larger rhythms of our practice. As we emerge and then retreat and emerge again from the pandemic, we may find our rhythm off-balance, our outer shells softened and suddenly sensitive to the cacophony of the larger world. We may find what we thought was a new normal shifting and disappearing and shifting again in some way changed beyond our basic recognition.
I found this beautiful poem called “Start Close In” by poet David Whyte in his book David Whyte: Essentials* which evokes a deep sense of this.
Start close in
don’t take the second step
or the third,
start with the first
thing
close in,
the step
you don’t want to take.Start with
the ground
you know,
the pale ground
beneath your feet,
your own
way to begin
the conversation.Start with your own
question,
give up on other
people's
questions,
don’t let them
smother something
simple.To hear
another’s voice,
follow
your own voice,
wait until
that voicebecomes an
intimate private ear
that can
really listen
to another.Start right now
take a small step
you can call your own
don’t follow
someone else’s
heroics, be humble
and focused,
start close in,
don’t mistake
that other
for your own.Start close in,
don’t take
the second step
or the third,
start with the first
thing
close in,
the step
you don’t want to take.The editor Gayle Karen Young Whyte writes in the commentary:
START CLOSE IN. This poem was inspired by the first lines of Dante’s Comedia, written in the midst of the despair of exile from his beloved Florence. It reflects the difficult act we all experience, of trying to make a home in the world again when everything has been taken away; the necessity of stepping bravely again into what looks now like a dark wood, when the outer world as we know it has disappeared, when the world has to be met and in some ways made again from no outer ground but from the very center of our being. The temptation is to take the second or third step, not the first, to ignore the invitation into the center of our own body, into our grief, to attempt to finesse the grief and the absolutely necessary understanding at the core of the pattern, to forgo the radical and almost miraculous simplification into which we are being invited, Start close in.
Whether the world has been changed by a pandemic, storms and fires, or a private tragedy, or even a cruel remark, we all know that urge to take the second step or the third. Come, let’s start close in...together.
* David Whyte: Essentials, Gayle Karen Young Whyte, Many Rivers Press, Langley, WA c2020