HOLLY HOLY WHOLELY

Merry Christmas to YOU.  I am passing on some good thoughts to you all this morning.  Not my thoughts David Whyte is my go to poet and his piece is worthy.  Whether you be in snow or sun, gathered or alone, do remember there is always a place in the world where you are not alone.  Holiness is about finding it.  For me, just stepping out the door and drinking in some free air will do it..  Do your best and come at the world with openness of heart.

Blessings, Misty   25 December 2014

FINDING THE HOLY IN THE HOLIDAYS:

Holiness is the center that holds all peripheries; the pure internal absence that makes sense of everyone and everything that comes to visit; the ground beneath feet running to look for gifts; the held note of a song that leaves a chapel silent or the stopped listener still and attentive in the busiest, most glittering street. Holiness is the beautiful nothingness birthed inside us that allows all other things to happen, an internal gravitational field of invitation and gathering and an outward and radical letting alone: of family, of food, of perspectives; the holy is reached through letting go, by giving up on willed perfection. Holiness is the rehabilitation of the discarded; the uncelebrated and the imperfect, in our selves, in others, even in our close relatives, into new unities, perceived again as gift. Holiness is the bringing of the detailed outside into the vast unspoken and horizon-less inside, from where the inside seems to give again, transformed as if by the simple act of breathing in and breathing out, back to the world.

Holiness is memory independent of time, time not as besieging force in which things are done but time radiating out from the place where we stand, welling from the unspoken that holds together all words said at the busy surface; holiness marries hurry to rest, stress to spaciousness, and joy to heartbreak in our difficult attempt to give and receive dissolving giver and receiver into one conversation, untouched by the hurry of the hours. 

Holiness is not in Bethlehem, nor Jerusalem, nor the largest, most glittering, mall, unless we are there in good company, with a friend, with a loved one, with our affections, with our best and most generous thoughts, most of all with a deep form of inhabited silence, a natural, grounded, central conversation with what and how and to whom we like to give. Holiness is coming to ground in the essence of our giving and receiving, a mirror in which we can see both our virtues and our difficulties, but also, a doorway to the life we want beyond this particular form of exchange.

Holiness is beautiful beckoning uncertainty: time celebrated and time already gone so quickly. Holiness dissolves the prison of time and lies only one short step from the present busy moment: one look into the starry darkness of the mid-winter sky at the midnight hour, one glance at a son or a daughter’s face; one sight of a distressed friend alone in the midst of a crowded celebration. Holiness is a step taken not to the left or to the right, but straight through present besieging outer circumstances, to the core of the pattern we inhabit at the very center of the celebration. Holiness is reached not through effort or will, but by stopping; by an inward coming to rest; a place from which we can embody the mid winter spirit of our days, a radical, inhabited simplicity, where we live in a kind of on going surprise and with some wonder and appreciation, flawed and far from perfection, but inhabiting the still center of a beautiful, peripheral giftedness.

Finding the Holy in the Holidays
© David Whyte
Mid Winter Thoughts © 2014

Photo: © David Whyte. Jan 2013.
New Snow. Jardin Des Tuileries. Paris