Hiding

In case you haven’t noticed, I just recently started sharing some pretty intimate details about the most difficult time of my life thus far. I have been challenged in ways that I was nowhere near prepared for– physically, mentally and spiritually. I was almost going to say that I’ve been to hell and back but that’s not true at all. I have been given the opportunity to become something new.

Was it the health issues that inspired the spiritual crisis or the other way around? At this point in the game I am only interested in gathering the wisdom that I’ve been gifted from these experiences and moving forward. Pain pills, surgeries, antibiotics, weight loss, depression, hopelessness and all of the other crap that came along with it is behind me now.

“When the doors of perception are cleansed, things will appear as they truly are.”

With that being said, I came across this little gem this morning and had to post it here. I guess this is my way of truly honoring the darkness and the hiding. I knew I was being rerouted the entire time, even when I was kicking and screaming.

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 snow bound 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 precious inside us does not care to be known by the mind in ways that diminish its presence.

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 our selves, 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.

© David Whyte: March 2014: Excerpted from ‘HIDING’ From the upcoming book of essays CONSOLATIONS: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words.