4 Poems That Changed My Life - third installment
Since the postpartum depression of my mid twenties, darkness visits me without an invite. During the swing of hormonal change during my late forties, much of my life lacked color, but the blackness of melancholy oozed into most every crack of what I felt was the imperfect in my life.
Lost in the mire of isolation and loneliness, David Whyte’s book, The House of Belonging, found me as I perused the now defunct Thunderbird Book Shop in Carmel, CA. His words reframed the season I lived, opened me to experience darkness as womb, not just tomb, transformed my loneliness into an aloneness that birthed me into a much larger and more free world.
David Whyte
SWEET DARKNESS
When your eyes are tired
the world is tired also.
When your vision has gone
where the night has eyes
to recognize its own.
There you can be sure
you are not beyond love.
The dark will be your womb
tonight.
The night will give you a horizon
further than you can see.
You must learn one thing.
The world was made to be free in.
Give up all the other worlds
except the one to which you belong.
Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet
confinement of your aloneness
to learn
anything or anyone
that does not bring you alive
is too small for you.
The House of Belonging, David Whyte, Many Rivers Press, 2004 p.23