THE HOUSE OF BELONGING

I awoke

this morning

in the gold light

turning this way

and that

thinking for

a moment

it was one

day

like any other.

But

the veil had gone

from my

darkened heart

and

I thought

it must have been the quiet

candlelight

that filled my room,

it must have been

the first

easy rhythm

with which I breathed

myself to sleep,

it must have been

the prayer I said

speaking to the otherness

of the night.

And

I thought

this is the good day

you could

meet your love,

this is the gray day

someone close

to you could die.

This is the day

you realize

how easily the thread

is broken

between this world

and the next

and I found myself

sitting up

in the quiet pathway

of light,

the tawny close

grained cedar

burning round

me like fire

and all the angels

of this housely

heaven ascending

through the first

roof of light

the sun had made.

This is the bright home

in which I live,

this is where

I ask

my friends

to come,

this is where I want

to love all the things

it has taken me so long

to learn to love.

This is the temple

of my adult aloneness

and I belong

to that aloneness

as I belong to my life.

There is no house

like the house of belonging.”

-David Whyte (The House of Belonging)

“There is nothing like waking in a sunlit room with view, but perhaps nothing better than waking in a sunlit room with a view than waking with a writing desk in a sunlit room with a view. And in the case of this poem, waking in a sunlit room with a writing desk and a view after a passing through a very dark passage in life. ‘What shape waits in the seed of you to grow and spread its branches against a future sky? Is it waiting in the fertile sea? In the trees beyond the house? In the life you can imagine for yourself? In the open and lovely white page on the waiting desk?”

-David Whyte