Poems for Your Winter Conversation

As you begin this Winter journey of “Awareness”, I invite you to take some time to reflect on these two poems. One might speak to you more than another. In our conversation, we will share the insights and of how they spoke to us.


SWEET DARKNESS

When your eyes are tired the world is tired also.
When your vision has gone no part of the world can find you.

Time to go into the dark where the night has eyes to recognize its own.
There you can be sure you are not beyond love.

The dark will be your womb tonight.
The night will give you a horizon further than you can see.

You must learn one thing.
The world was made to be free in.

Give up all the other worlds except the one to which you belong.
Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet confinement of your aloneness
to learn anything or anyone that does not bring you alive is too small for you.

– David Whyte

FIRE

What makes a fire burn
is space between the logs,
a breathing space.

Too much of a good thing, too many logs
packed in too tight can douse the flames almost as surely
as a pail of water would.

So, building fires requires attention
to the spaces in between, as much as to the wood.

When we are able to build open spaces
in the same way we have learned to pile on the logs,
then we can come to see how it is fuel,
and absence of the fuel together, that make fire possible.

We only need to lay a log lightly from time to time.

A fire grows simply because the space is there,
with openings in which the flame
that knows just how it wants to burn can find its way.

– Judy Brown, from The Sea Accepts All Rivers