Whyte, D. (2001). Crossing the unknown sea: Work as a pilgrimage of identity. Riverhead Books.
- [159] We may not think of the child we once were from day today, but triggered by the deep losses or enormous gains that mark our path through life and work, we hope in secret for the child’s continued friendship as we travel towards some distant maturity…. The child’s distance from us, the child we once were, can be as painful as the distance from a real son or daughter, especially if we fear we have failed in the midst of all our public successes at a particularly private dream, a dream original to the flawed genius of our growing. Looking back at that child, we may find our earlier hopes painful; an unwanted encouragement to attempt at all once more, or, a searing memory that mocks our embittered refusal to try again
- [160] To a child, a courageous aunt, a roguish uncle, an authentic teacher, a true friend; a scintillating character in a picture book, all hold, by their example, imaginative treasures that a child will use later and they must open their life work once more to a sense of freedom and happiness. Years later, at a difficult threshold–at thirty, forty, fifty-five or sixty-five–we suddenly remember exactly the place in our body we buried those freedoms, and marking the spot, dig deep into the ground of that memory to reclaim and live them again.
- [220] To forego one form of intoxication is to hunt for another. No passion is cured without an equal one taking its place. The reformed alcoholic must find the drama of her pilgrimage back to sobriety as compelling as her initial descent into drink. She does it by telling her story again and again in the circle of listeners; her articulation finally finding a fervor that will fill her needs for self-forgetfulness.
- [223] Whatever the hour of the day, in our work we must do the right thing, in the right way, for the right end. The multilevel discipline involved in good work is the road to happiness and the pilgrimage to self-respect. Once the job is done, we circle it, admire it—even if no one else can or will—clean up, and move on. Leaving the work to find its own place in the world is the mark of a good Workman, a good workwoman.
∞
David Whyte. (2014). Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/24108839-consolations
Hiding
is a way of staying alive. Hiding is a way of holding ourselves until we are ready to come into the light. Hiding is one of the brilliant and virtuoso practices of almost every part of the natural world: the protective quiet of an icy northern landscape, the held bud of a future summer rose, the snowbound internal pulse of the hibernating bear. Hiding is underestimated. We are hidden by life in our mother’s womb until we grow and ready ourselves for our first appearance in the lighted world; to appear too early in that world is to find ourselves with the immediate necessity for outside intensive care.
Hiding done properly is the internal faithful promise for a proper future emergence, as embryos, as children or even as emerging adults in retreat from the names that have caught us and imprisoned us, often in ways where we have been too easily seen and too easily named. We live in a time of the dissected soul, the immediate disclosure; our thoughts, imaginings and longings exposed to the light too much, too early and too often, our best qualities squeezed too soon into a world already awash with ideas that oppress our sense of self and our sense of others. What is real is almost always to begin with, hidden, and does not want to be understood by the part of our mind that mistakenly thinks it knows what is happening. What is
Hiding is an act of freedom from the misunderstanding of others, especially in the enclosing world of oppressive secret government and private entities, attempting to name us, to anticipate us, to leave us with no place to hide and grow in ways unmanaged by a creeping necessity for absolute naming, absolute tracking and absolute control. Hiding is a bid for independence, from others, from mistaken ideas we have about ourselves, from an oppressive and mistaken wish to keep us completely safe, completely ministered to, and therefore completely managed. Hiding is creative, necessary and beautifully subversive of outside interference and control. Hiding leaves life to itself, to become more of itself. Hiding is the radical independence necessary for our emergence into the light of a proper human future.
Contrast this with O’Donoghue’s “Threshold” piece
- For those that don’t know. O’Donoghue and Whyte were friends.