To those elements we have yet to see or imagine,Īnd look for the true shape of our own self,Ĭomplement with Whyte on anger, forgiveness, and what maturity really means, friendship, love, and heartbreak, how we enlarge ourselves by surrendering to the uncontrollable, and when it’s time to end a relationship, then other splendid recordings of poets reading their own work: Adrienne Rich reads “What Kind of Times Are These” Elizabeth Alexander reads “Praise Song for the Day” Sylvia Plath reads “Spinster” Mark Strand reads “The End” Langston Hughes reads “We Are the American Heartbreak.

In this recording from Krista Tippett’s altogether sublime On Being interview with Whyte, he reads this simple, transcendently wakeful poem of supreme relevance to our divided world: Nearly a century later, the English poet, philosopher, and redeemer of meaning David Whyte gave shape to that relational inextricability of our lives in his beautiful poem “Working Together,” found in his collection River Flow: New & Selected Poems ( public library). Why we do that and how we can transcend it is what poet and philosopher David Whyte explores in a portion of his endlessly insightful Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words (public library), which also gave us Whyte’s wisdom on aloneness, the deeper meanings of friendship, love, and heartbreak, and. “Relationship is the fundamental truth of this world of appearance,” wrote the great Indian poet and philosopher Tagore - the first non-European awarded a Nobel Prize in Literature - in his 1930 meditation on human nature and the interdependence of existence.

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