Dear Friends,

I’ve read and listened to more poems over the past year than at any other time in my life, but I don’t consider myself well read. I’m lazy when it comes to seeking out new-to-me poems; they come to me through a few well worn channels – some email lists, a podcast or two. I like what I like when I like it, and I don’t think too much about why. I sometimes purchase books by the poets I really like (many I’ve shared in previous letters), and I keep these near at hand, turn to them in the dawning hours of the morning while I sip coffee and ease into a day. I have a handful of poems that I return to often. These might be pasted into my sketchbook, marked with a folded page corner, or saved in my phone. These are the poems which have burned a particular image in my mind, tingled the back of my neck with an arresting melody of words, or have massaged my battered spirit. I want to share one of these poems; it’s called “Everything Is Waiting for You” by David Whyte.

Your great mistake is to act the drama
as if you were alone. As if life
were a progressive and cunning crime
with no witness to the tiny hidden
transgressions. To feel abandoned is to deny
the intimacy of your surroundings. […]

(Continue reading at Onbeing.org.)

I find such comfort in these words. The poem speaks to my tenacious belief in the profound, elemental connections that exist between everything – what David Whyte calls “the conversational nature of reality.” I am deeply a part of this world, interdependent, changing it as it changes me (nod to Octavia Butler), in fact exchanging matter and energy at the subatomic level with all things. At that level, the apparent boundaries between me and you, the soil in the ground, the robin, the grub, the pine, the squirrel, the laptop I’m typing on, the chair I’m sitting on – these boundaries dissolve into a chorus of cosmic relationships. (For more on this, watch Mindwalk [jump to a scene starting at 1:01:50], a film co-written by the physicist Fritjof Capra which explores a philosophy of physics through a fictional dialogue unfolding in a medieval monastery.) See, the world is alive, and to know that is to be present in the conversation.

Maybe David Whyte’s poem was knocking around my subconscious as my hand began to draw these simple chairs, differently sized and loosely arranged. Empty, yet, to me, suggestive of the bodies which may occupy them. A kind of presence is circumscribed by empty chairs; their absence is pregnant with the possibility of bodies at rest, alone or together, facing a single direction or oriented in a circle. Chairs enable many kinds of activities and states. I remember in graduate school a discussion about how the configuration of chairs left in a classroom or studio could provide a glimpse into how the space was formerly used. Chairs crammed together and facing a wall – here was a studio critique. Chairs shoved aside haphazardly to the side of the room – maybe the group had enacted some kind of performance or full body activity. A small subset of abandoned chairs pulled together from the herd around a table pointed to an intimate seminar discussion. Here are the kind of subtle conversations in Whyte’s poem, which absolutely depend upon paying attention to things outside of ourselves in order to enter into these conversations: “Your great mistake is to act the drama / as if you were alone.”

Isolation has been one of the watchwords over this past pandemic year. I’ve felt it in my own way, as I expect you have. Many others have felt it more so in the extreme, experiencing a near total aloneness. The effects of this separation from others are serious, breaking physical and mental health. Whyte’s poem isn’t an antidote to this great social cleavage; it can’t undo our biological need for closeness with others, for human touch and community, however we define it. What I find in the poem – “Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into the / conversation” – is an invitation to mindfulness, to shift my attention outside of myself toward the things that are not me. A practice that reveals my place in the grand scheme of the world, and may, if only momentarily, break the perspective of isolation.

May we be together soon!

Jeremy