Word Of The Day: WHOLEHEARTED

Over the next few weeks I will be focusing on a word of the day drawn from a list created at the beginning of January. Each word was chosen to serve as a guide to inspire and inform my steps through 2020. If you are just joining me now and want to look in on earlier posts on this topic, you will find links to each at the end.

WHOLEHEARTED

One of my core beliefs is that we are all called to live wholehearted lives. I aspire to live into that truth every day with varying degrees of success, and with sometimes slow but always steady progress. In my work, through speaking, writing and teaching, I invite others to aspire to the same.

It is a way of living that on the surface is hard to disagree with. I mean who would admit to wanting to live halfheartedly? And yet, what does it really mean to live with our whole heart? Our entire heart? All of it?

A friend recently reminded me of the truth found, but potentially overlooked, in the very title of David Whyte’s poem, Everything Is Waiting For You. The good news is that everything is waiting for us. The harder news is that everything is waiting for us. Everything. The good and the bad, the easy and the hard, the energizing and the exhausting, what we welcome and search for and what we dread and avoid. A whole heart has space for it all. (Hear David Whyte read Everything Is Waiting For You in his interview with Krista Tippett.)

In Autumn: A Season of Paradox, Parker Palmer, the educator, activist, and founder of The Center For Courage & Renewal puts it this way—“Split off from each other, neither darkness nor light is fit for human habitation. The moment we say “yes” to both of them and join their paradoxical dance, the two conspire to make us healthy and whole.” To live wholeheartedly means to encounter and engage with the truth of our lives, the whole of which can only be found by welcoming the dark as much as the light.

There are no two ways about it. Living a wholehearted life is not for the faint of heart. It is the most challenging, and the most exhilarating, work we will ever do. It’s why we are here.

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For Weekend Reflection

Maturity is not a static arrived platform, where life is viewed from a calm, untouched oasis of wisdom, but a living elemental frontier between what has happened, what is happening now and the consequences of that past and present, first imagined and then lived into the waiting future.

~David Whyte: CONSOLATIONS

 

What does your past tell you that can help you live more fully into your waiting future? 

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Bearing Witness

“the ultimate touchstone is witness, the privilege of having been seen by someone and the equal privilege of being granted the sight of the essence of another…”

David Whyte - Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and the Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words

Once a month I have the privilege of sharing time with two dear friends. We live in different cities and so use a video conferencing platform, which is usually as close as we can come to sitting on a porch somewhere together. We began as colleagues, ended up as friends, and the only real agenda of our monthly shared space is to show up together in whatever state we find ourselves. Today, as I shared some of my story as it looks right now, they listened deeply as they always do, and when I was done speaking, there was a lingering shared silence that communicated more than words could ever say. More words weren’t needed.

In bearing witness they had provided what mattered most.

To be seen.

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The Step To Take

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.

David Whyte

(Excerpted from River Flow: New & Selected Poems )

Today in conversation with another coach, we were reflecting on next steps, and how to pursue what is calling us, right from where we are. In the midst of what is, how do we step closer to what could be? It is easy to get focused on the far horizon, and miss the fertile ground squarely beneath our feet. Wherever we want to go, where we are is the place to start.

Sharing a bit of silence, David Whyte’s poem, Start Close In came to mind, and I introduced the words quoted above to our conversation. Instantly a next step came to mind. One that was close in. A step that wasn’t the first choice, but the right choice.

Wherever we are, there is a next step. One that is close in, and while it may not be the one we want to take, it is the step that will lead us deeper into the life we are called to live.

What is the step you don’t want to take?

The one close in?

Take that one.

With gratitude to DC

With gratitude to DC

Grounded

“Ground is what lies beneath our feet. It is the place where we already stand; a state of recognition, the place or the circumstances to which we belong whether we wish to or not. It is what holds and supports us, but also what we do not want to be true; it is what challenges us, physically or psychologically, irrespective of our hoped for needs. It is the living, underlying foundation that tells us what we are, where we are, what season we are in and what, no matter what we wish in the abstract, is about to happen in our body, in the world or in the conversation between the two.

To come to ground is to find a home in circumstances and in the very physical body we inhabit in the midst of those circumstances and above all to face the truth, no matter how difficult that truth may be; to come to ground is to begin the courageous conversation, to step into difficulty and by taking that first step, begin the movement through all difficulties, to find the support and foundation that has been beneath our feet all along; a place to step onto, a place on which to stand, and a place from which to step.”

- from Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words by David Whyte

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