Welsh whyte

But just outside, invisible and unexpected, is someone who offers him help — and friendship — at the exact moment he needs it. Their lifelong friendship takes root here, in the magical, windswept landscape of Wales, where place-names are poetry, where memories live long in the rolling hills. David Whyte is a poet and author. He has written 10 volumes of poetry and four books of prose, including the bestselling The Heart Aroused: Poetry and the Preservation of the Soul in Corporate America.

As a poet, David Whyte uses words to bring light to our deepest human feelings and impulses. He takes us back to a magical time when he lived in the Welsh mountains, when he was just coming into his own as a poet.

Sharing stories of truths that are both ethereal and yet wholly grounded in the wisdom of the land and its people. I am not easy on myself beneath that wind. I am having a really difficult time and feeling very, very sorry for this young man who wants to become a writer. I need help, I remember saying I need help. Visible and invisible help. Invisible help is the help that you do not as yet know you need. Sometimes that help appears and you walk right past it.

And other times you actually recognize it. And this invisible help is one day suddenly made visible right outside of my caravan. In this series, we combine immersive first-person stories and breathtaking music with the science-backed benefits of mindfulness practice. From WaitWhat, this is Meditative Story.

The body relaxed. The body breathing. Your senses open. Your mind open. Meeting the world. A second Darwin, perhaps. Only a few short months into time amongst the bird cries, the incoming waves, and the disturbing everyday inter-animal violence of the life there, I find that none of the animals or birds have read a single zoology book that I have read.

That they have lives and secret selves unmediated by human classification and naming. To my consternation, I find that I am really not equipped with a language to describe what I am experiencing: most especially the imminent sense of death and disappearance that is present in those islands. One evening on the boat I am guiding, staring at the swift falling equatorial sunset, I find myself quietly unraveling, my firm sense of self with which I had reached the islands, broken apart by the complex interwoven immensity of what I was witnessing.

For a while, in those islands, I am just barely holding on to the fixed sanity I brought with me. But not just witnessing. One other day, three months into my time there, I am on a new boat as a guide, with a new crew who have still not accepted me, with new people who are irritating me, with a newly woken, more vulnerable me, not knowing how to fit anywhere in the world, natural or human, and I have to say, walking along, feeling a little sorry for myself.

To comfort myself with some sort of insulated aloneness, I walk 20 paces ahead of everyone along the path, and there on a branch right across the path, at eye level, I come across an unblinking, unmoving guardian to the secret of my future life, and in a way, the work and the writing I will do in that life. I stop, everyone stops behind me; the hawk just stays there looking back, swaying slightly on its branch, yellow hawk eyes staring into my brown human eyes.

I stop, and I stare back. I am looking into the essence of hawk-ness in the world. I am looking straight into the well and the depths of its eyes, I am looking at that corner of creation which laughs at any manufactured name we have given it, but is hawk-ness itself. Time stops its linear procession and begins to radiate from where I stand. I feel simultaneously a physical, body unravelling and a sense of revelation all at the same time.

The surprise in the revelation is that I have the experience of the hawk looking just as deeply into that corner of creation that I occupy in my humanity. But it is looking straight beneath any surface personality, any David Whyte-ness and straight to another, unnameable foundation that I am just beginning to understand.

Many years later, I look back on that fixed image of the hawk as a guardian to the temple of the self — which once we enter the temple is, actually, no fixed self at all. But a moving conversation. The encounter with the hawk is the first of a series of ever deeper steps into the conversation every human being discovers and is initially frightened by, between what you think is you, and what you think is not you.

It is the ancient, conversational dynamic around what seem like two opposing poles, and one every great contemplative tradition has centered its disciplines around. I return to North Wales on a cold October day, the wind like a knife off the Irish Sea, felt very keenly indeed after two years in South America.

I am returning to Eryrie, those mountains of longing, not knowing what I will do in the future, as a scientist or an artist. I come back to this place halfway up the mountain in Wales almost in retreat, to try and find out who is here after that extraordinary experience in those far-flung Islands. How can I follow that? I start writing. I am in some way, like the classic Vietnam veteran, hiding away from the mainstream, except I had not been traumatized by violence, I had in a way been traumatized by beauty, the island sights still filling my dreams and its sounds still ringing in my ears.

I move into a tiny caravan on the farm, a tiny freezing caravan, looking out from the mountain, facing Ireland and the wind. I live there, I work there with John, the Welsh farmer.

In the evenings, I write. Take some time to imagine David here. I know the land of Northwest Wales a little bit so I can see it. What do you see? Let the space, the big skies soften your shoulders. WHYTE: I spend a good year there, digging the animals out of snowdrifts: lambing and shearing, dipping the sheep helped by the extraordinarily well-trained sheepdogs owned by John. Even in his worst temper, he never hits a dog; his aluminum crook is bent, however, from hitting stone walls in frustration as he instructs at high volume across the fields.

Somehow he manages to produce some of the best dogs in North Wales. People come from far away to buy these dogs.

There are many winter nights when the wind comes up the Ogwen Valley below and threatens to blow my caravan away. Although we associate invisible help with unseen parallels, I always feel that invisible help can actually be interpreted in a very practical way.

We are a little community at Tan-y-Garth. Besides the main farm, there is an older cottage which is tucked into the very rock itself, a cottage whose back wall is the living rock of the mountain. Probably the original farmhouse. A new family moves into this cottage. And I notice that the father in the family is employed to do work around the farm that I am not doing. British Broadcasting Corporation Home.

In order to see this content you need to have both Javascript enabled and Flash installed. Visit BBC Webwise for full instructions. Lucky for him he had 13 months and 4 days to himself before I came along. I'm talking about my brother. He's always been 13 months and 4 days taller, 13 months and 4 days cleverer, 13 months and 4 days more experienced. Did he take advantage of this? Well, I remember trying to race Brad across the Chester Bridge but I was always too scared of the gaps between the planks.

But the main reason was because he ran faster than me. I was making up excuses. I'd pretend to be so scared and couldn't run and had to hold my dad's hand. I bluffed that one for a while.

Simple tasks like drawing or playing with Lego blocks and he'd have the upper hand. He'd always get the best colours and the biggest blocks. Any chance I had to colour and he'd shout at me for doing it too loud.

He'd shout at me for clicking the Lego blocks together too hard. As we grew up we both developed skills that the other couldn't grasp. I mastered the piano. As soon as I got into a nice melody, he'd sneak up to the piano and plonk really hard the top keys. It was so annoying. Although he's a pain on the piano keys, he's still my big brother. He's been my best mate all my life and putting our Lego days behind us, we can settle our differences over a nice pint together.

Thanks for sharing it.