Wednesday, March 10, 2010

Comfort Food
















Everything is Waiting for You

Your great mistake is to act the drama
as if you were alone. As if life
were a progressive and cunning crime
with no witness to the tiny hidden
transgressions. To feel abandoned is to deny
the intimacy of your surroundings. Surely,
even you, at times, have felt the grand array;
the swelling presence, and the chorus, crowding
out your solo voice. You must note
the way the soap dish enables you,
or the window latch grants you freedom.
Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity.
The stairs are your mentor of things
to come, the doors have always been there
to frighten you and invite you,
and the tiny speaker in the phone
is your dream-ladder to divinity.

Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into
the conversation. The kettle is singing
even as it pours you a drink, the cooking pots
have left their arrogant aloofness and
seen the good in you at last. All the birds
and creatures of the world are unutterably
themselves. Everything is waiting for you.

-- David Whyte
from Everything is Waiting for You 
©2003 Many Rivers Press


I read the poem a few days ago and was terrifically comforted by it. Then today I was reading Clarence Laughlin's First Principles of the Third World of Photography, and #9 and #10 made me think of the poem and go on a mad search for it.

9. If the photographer looks intensely enough, he can find the secret images of our fears, joys and desires. Everything is speaking to us - every object.


10. All things are interconnected, whether we see the connections or not.