The Winter of Listening - David Whyte

No one but me by the fire, my hands burning
red in the palms while
the night wind carries everything away outside.

All this petty worry while the great cloak of the sky grows dark and intense

‘round every living thing.

What is precious inside us does not care to be known by the mind

in ways that diminish its presence.

What we strive for in perfection
is not what turns us into the lit angel we desire,

what disturbs
and then nourishes has everything
we need.

What we hate
in ourselves
is what we cannot know in ourselves but
what is true to the pattern does not need
to be explained.

Inside everyone
is a great shout of joy waiting to be born.

Even with summer so far off
I feel it grown in me now and ready
to arrive in the world.

All those years listening to those who had
nothing to say.

All those years forgetting
how everything has its own voice to make

itself heard.

All those years forgetting
how easily
you can belong
to everything simply by listening.

And the slow difficulty
of remembering how everything is born from

an opposite and miraculous otherness.

Silence and winter have led m to that otherness.

So let this winter of listening
be enough
for the new life

I must call my own.

Every sound
has a home
from which it has come to us
and a door
through which it is going again,
out into the world
to make another home.

We speak
only with the voices
of those
we can hear ourselves and the body has a voice only for that portion
of the body of the world it has learned to perceive.

It becomes
a world itself by listening hard
for the way it belongs.

There it can learn
how it
must be and what

it must do.

And
here
in the tumult
of the night
I hear the walnut
above the child’s swing swaying
its dark limbs
in the wind
and the rain now
come to
beat against my window and somewhere

in this cold night of wind and stars the first whispered opening of

those hidden
and invisible springs that uncoil
in the still summer air each yet
to be imagined
rose.