I've mentioned previously that I am currently in the process of reviewing my past journals before disposing of them. (Incidentally they will be turned into re-cycled paper or cardboard - a death and resurrection even for old journals!) The David Whyte poem below came my way via a six week event on the Gratefulness site. As I listened to David Whyte speaking his own poem I recognised how beautifully is expresses what I am discovering as I look back over the previous decades of my life. The title Santiago refers to the well known pilgrimage often called the Camino, which ends at Santiago. Click here for more information.
Santiago
The
road seen, then not seen, the hillside
hiding
then revealing the way you should take,
the
road dropping away from you as if leaving you
to
walk on thin air, then catching you, holding you up,
when
you thought you would fall,
and
the way forward always in the end
the
way that you followed, the way that carried you
into
your future, that brought you to this place,
no
matter that it sometimes took your promise from you,
no
matter that it had to break your heart along the way:
the
sense of having walked from far inside yourself
out
into the revelation, to have risked yourself
for
something that seemed to stand both inside you
and
far beyond you, that called you back
to
the only road in the end you could follow, walking
as
you did, in your rags of love and speaking in the voice
that
by night became a prayer for safe arrival,
so
that one day you realized that what you wanted
had
already happened long ago and in the dwelling place
you
had lived in before you began,
and
that every step along the way, you had carried
the
heart and the mind and the promise
that
first set you off and drew you on and that you were
more
marvelous in your simple wish to find a way
than
the gilded roofs of any destination you could reach:
as
if, all along, you had thought the end point might be a city
with
golden towers, and cheering crowds,
and
turning the corner at what you thought was the end
of
the road, you found just a simple reflection,
and
a clear revelation beneath the face looking back
and
beneath it another invitation, all in one glimpse:
like
a person and a place you had sought forever,
like
a broad field of freedom that beckoned you beyond;
like another life, and
the road still stretching on.
from David Whyte’s
collection Pilgrim
