Poem | Find your legs

I see wonderful, talented people with noble dreams…

But this hard city, with all its machinations, reduces them.

To heaps of false strategies and crumbling assumptions.

To motions, mimicry and broken confidence.

To ambition, with not one thing to stand on.

Find your legs, find your legs, I say!

And feel again what it feels like to walk, alone,

Into a city that is yours.

Anon.

Photo credit: moi.

Ready for the wild life?

Are you leading your own life, or the life you or others think you should be living? Do you belong or feel abandoned?

These are the gnawing questions put to us by David Whyte in much of his poetry and writing.

Not your everyday cocktail chatter, but important questions nonetheless! How does one begin to frame an answer?

Mr. Whyte, not one to abandon us, throws a life-line:

“Every courageous life is lived in the grit and difficulty of existence. Dante says ‘in the middle of road of my life, I awoke in a dark wood where the true way was wholly lost.’ A beautiful authentic line and one of the reasons that The Comedia has been such an abiding classic through the centuries of western literature is because it is incredibly sincere. He is not basing his knowledge on all-knowing competence. He’s basing it on investigative vulnerability. He doesn’t say to you he has these three rules, these seven laws. He says you know one day I just stopped telling myself all the things I’d been telling myself and I stopped needing to know all the things I’d been needing to know and I just actually started paying attention to things as they seem to be in their own voices.

So, where do you stand?

Just when you thought this blog was going to get all focused on emerging brands, here’s a spot of poetry for you:

Self Portrait

It doesn’t interest me if there is one God
Or many gods.
I want to know if you belong — or feel abandoned;
If you know despair
Or can see it in others.
I want to know
If you are prepared to live in the world
With its harsh need to change you;
If you can look back with firm eyes
Saying “this is where I stand.”
I want to know if you know how to melt
Into that fierce heat of living
Falling toward the center of your longing.
I want to know if you are willing
To live day by day
With the consequence of love
And the bitter unwanted passion
Of your sure defeat.
I have been told
In that fierce embrace
Even the gods
Speak of God.

David Whyte wrote this in his hotel room after visiting the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. Apparently he took inspiration from the painter’s vivid, coolly detached self-portraits, especially the one depicting you-know-who with his ear freshly lopped off.

Anyway, we’re off to Amsterdam next week to take a closer look and will send along a photo if they let us take one (the Dutch are pretty low-key about this stuff, but we wonder with all the big art heists going on in Europe these days).

In the meantime, here’s a sampling of some other poems from David Whyte’s web site. Mr. Whyte encourages us to step boldly into an authentic, engaged life and reading (or listening) to his poetry for the first, second or third time feels like stumbling onto a palm-lined oasis after weeks in the Sahara, no Pellegrino in sight.

OK, we dramatize a little…

Poetry & drama aside, it is worth a visit to the man’s web site to catch a good bespoke business model in action.