Naam

Hoe? 

Dat is misschien wel een van de meest lastige vragen. Want het vermogen om ons thuis te voelen brengt tegelijkertijd het risico van het tegenovergestelde met zich mee: we kunnen onszelf verstoppen, ons anders voordoen dan we zijn of ons afgesneden voelen. Wie kent het niet? Ballingschap in brede zin is een universeel menselijk thema dat doorwerkt in individuen en culturen en over generaties heen.  

Wat heeft het gesprek tussen onszelf en de wereld te maken met werk? Volgens David Whyte is dit gesprek cruciaal. Een innerlijk gesprek met wat we doen is nodig om alle uiterlijke gesprekken zinvol te laten zijn – en in het beste geval is het gesprek tussen onszelf en de wereld datgene wat werk wordt. 

Hoe? Dat kan op allerlei manieren, maar het ligt misschien nog het meest voor de hand bij creatief werk. 

Intellectual work sometimes, spiritual work certainly, artistic work always – these are forces that fall within its grasp, forces that must travel beyond the realm of the hour and the restraint of the habit. Nor can the actual work be well separated from the entire life. Like the knights of the Middle Ages, there is little the creatively inclined person can do but to prepare himself, body and spirit, for the labor to come – for his adventures are all unknown. In truth, the work itself is the adventure. And no artist could go about this work, or would want to, with less than extraordinary energy and concentration. The extraordinary is what art is about.

“Nunc sit amet turpis”
…

David Whyte

In that first hardly noticed moment in which you wake,
coming back to this life from the other
more secret, moveable and frighteningly honest world
where everything began,
there is a small opening into the new day
which closes the moment you begin your plans.

What you can plan is too small for you to live.
What you can live wholeheartedly will make plans enough
for the vitality hidden in your sleep.

To be human is to become visible
while carrying what is hidden as a gift to others.
To remember the other world in this world
is to live in your true inheritance.

You are not a troubled guest on this earth,
you are not an accident amidst other accidents
you were invited from another and greater night
than the one from which you have just emerged.

Now, looking through the slanting light of the morning window
toward the mountain presence of everything that can be
what urgency calls you to your one love?
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 writing desk?