a rock is a rock. a whale is a whale.

Seven or eight years ago, I listened to the poet David Whyte's audio series What to Remember When Waking over and over again. 

And one of his core principles that made the biggest impression on me was David's idea that to be a human being means that we feel a sense of exile in the world, a sense of not belonging. And this is just part of the make-up of being human. It doesn't mean we're doing something wrong, and in fact, our work is to consciously bear this sense of exile with compassion. David says:

A form of enlightenment may be to understand that you may never feel quite at home in the world and you’re not meant to. This is part of being human. We go into to nature to try and intuit the inherent belonging-ness and just "being ourself" that nature feels—a rock is a rock, a whale is a whale. But as humans, we aren’t meant to have this. We always feel as if we don’t quite belong. Just being ourself as a human is to feel slightly out of it. We’ll never be the image of perfection we want to be. And we’re not meant to. Our sense of compassion for the rest of creation and ourselves depends on our sense of exile. Thank God we’ll never be the image of perfection because it lacks the conversation and much larger territory we receive through our difficulties. Part of the courageous step we take is how we shape our identity and what it means to take the step to be more fully human and more fully here. Which means to understand we’re not meant to fully belong and create heaven here. We’re meant to hold both heaven and exile.

I remember hearing this as such a relief, and I think I re-listened to that section many times.

I, too, would go into nature and measure myself against the ease of nature, but, as David points out, this is measuring apples to oranges. And I found it to be such a relief to think that maybe the sense of not being at home in this world wasn't something wrong with me or something to fix, it was just an element of being human, and part of what makes us tender. 

In an interview with Tami Simon, David goes on to explain this idea around exile/not belonging: 

Part of this idea came to me when I was in a very exotic place. I was out in the African bush and watching a Malachi King Fisher, whose feathers are these really, primary colors of blue, white, and red and it was lit up by the evening sun. And I could just feel the “King Fisherness” in the world. And there was no other corner of creation that could actually substitute for the King Fisher. It made me think about what it meant to be fully human. I had had experiences with this living in the Galapagos for years in my twenties. I suddenly realized that one of the core competencies of being human was that we were the only corner of creation that could refuse to be ourselves. The King Fisher doesn’t get to choose to be a crow. And the mountain is just a mountain and the cloud is just a cloud. The tree is just a tree. That’s why the natural world seems to be so nourishing to us because we get an intonation of what it might be like just to be ourselves. But as human beings, we have this extraordinary ability not only not to be ourselves, but to pretend to be someone else and to hang a mask in front of our real identity. We can even take a further virtuosic step and forget that we’re hanging a mask in front of our face, which you remember to begin with the first few times you did it. Suddenly you’ve become the mask and you’re actually practicing that identity as a beautiful form of defense against the world.

I think it’s quite merciful actually to think that you can look at yourself and others and have a sense of compassion about that, reality is actually very fierce and very difficult–that it is actually quite extraordinary with the consciousness that we have of being alive, which many other creatures do not have, of loss and the poignancy of that loss. Therefore, it’s one of the foundational building blocks of real compassion for others. And I think that when you are a Father Keating or a Dalai Lama, when you’re with real authentic presence, it’s because they understand the fierce nature of the average human life and the loss and losses that are involved with it. Every human life is quite magnificent and dramatic and mythological because of the intensity of what’s at stake.

Once you understand that and turn your face back toward it, toward your ability to feel exile, toward the necessary human qualities of losing and being lost, then suddenly you find a place to stand in it all. And strangely enough, you find yourself emboldened by it actually and more courageous, because, I think, as you move closely into that sense of physical presence, you realize that you’re going to lose it all in the end. You’re going to have to give it all away, no matter how much money you have in the bank, no matter how big your spread is, it’s all going to go to other people in the end. Why not start practicing giving it away now, not necessarily in a Puritanical, saintly way but just risking it for what is really, really important.  Full interview here. 

What do you think? Is it a relief to remember that not feeling at home here is actually an important part of the human experience? I'd love to hear your thoughts. 

With care,
Brianna

photo by @meiying