Unknown
“Unknown accompanies us through every turn of our attempt to know.”
Reverie
“Reverie is to inhabit multiple layers of our consciousness all at once.”
Zen
“Zen always refuses to choose between light and dark, restlessness and order.”
Death
“Death only comes to find the person we have always secretly wanted to be.”
Love
“Love is a close secret we keep, even from ourselves.”
Blessing
“Blessing calls on what has waited for us all along, and speeds its arrival.”
Eclipse
“Eclipse is what was seemingly there, just a moment ago, in the heavens, in our lives.”
Illusion
“Illusion is the beckoning hand to our future heartbreak.”
You
“You is an ambitious word, considering I hardly know you at all.”
Body
“The body knows that it has already experienced an infinity of lifetimes.”
Breath
“Breath is the invisible made visible, the intangible made touchable and real.”
Care
“Care is the ability to see and celebrate the essence of another.”
Injury
“Injury is our unconscious enrolment in a fully earned form of hard-won presence.”
Intimacy
“Intimacy is the raw, living edge between what I think is me and what I think is you.”
Sex
“Sex is a prose word, masking what only the volcanic vocabulary of poetry can describe.”
Relationship
“Relationships, we have been telling ourselves for decades, are hard work.”
Background
“Background is not the shy, retiring, you-go-first word it seems to want to be.”
Routine
“Routine can be a way of forming intimate bonds with time itself.”
Brand
“Brand is an immovable image that stays with us through every seasonality.”
Rich
“Why not practice all the qualities of being rich right from the beginning?”
Vanity
“Vanity is the timeless underlying revelation of having been seen and been found.”
Immovable
“Immovability is just an invitation temporarily refused. Nothing stays still in the end.”
Echo
“Echo is as real as the voice that originally made it.”
Sleep
“Sleep is as ancient as life itself and lives in the very cellular nature of our identity."
Unordinary
“Unordinary might be a more merciful word than the word extraordinary.”
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Consolations II
To hear David Whyte is to glimpse a way of living: awake to beauty, attuned to the textures of daily life, and willing to follow the unknown. His readings carry us to wild places, draw us into and out of silence, and shine a light on the hidden corners of our inner world. David makes poetry a form of spiritual practice.
In Consolations II, David continues exploring the meanings of everyday words—and in doing so, stands beside us, quietly reshaping how we see ourselves. These sessions pair well with silence, slow mornings, or a walk through the hills.
to listen to all 25 sessions in this series.