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Forms From the Midnight Ink's avatar

Your words ring out with force! These reflections resonate with a poem David Whyte wrote about breaking promises. For context, I'll share it here:

TO BREAK A PROMISE

Make a place of prayer, no fuss,

just lean into the white brilliance

and say what you needed to say

all along, nothing too much, words

as simple and as yours and as heard

as the bird song above your head

or the river running gently beside you.

Let your words join

one to another

the way stone nestles on stone,

the way water just leaves

and goes to the sea,

the way your promise

breathes and belongs

with every other promise

the world has ever made.

Now, let them go on,

leave your words

to carry their own life

without you, let the promise

go with the river.

Have faith.

Walk away.

from

THE SEA IN YOU: Twenty Poems of Requited and Unrequited Love

© David Whyte and Many Rivers Press

He notes that the title of the poem could just as easily be called "To Make a Promise." He notes that making and breaking promises: “involve exactly the same combination of absolute presence and radical letting go.”

Thanks for your soulful words and reflections on the difficult topic of knowing when to dig deep and stay the course, and knowing when to bend the path towards something more generative. Either way, we are asked to stay with the trouble; to leave behind some former identity that doesn't fit the shape of the world that is being given to us. And either way, a new world beyond our imagination is waiting to meet us in our new shape and texture. But man, my mind sure wishes there was a clear manual to discern what the hell to let go of and what to give life to :)

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