Humble apprenticeship. So true.

Photo: © DW. Writing Desk, Mathern, Wales

NAMING LOVE TOO EARLY

Most of our heartbreak comes from attempting to name who we love or what we love or the way we love far too early in the journey of discovery. We can never know to begin with, in giving ourselves to a person, to a work, to a marriage or to a cause, exactly what kind of love we are involved with. When we demand a certain specific kind of reciprocation before the revelation has flowered completely we almost always find ourselves bereft and in that grief miss the particular form of love that is actually possible but that did not meet our initial and too specific expectations. Feeling bereft we take our identity as one who is disappointed in love, our almost proud sense of disillusionment preventing us from seeing the lack of reciprocation from the person or the situation as simply a difficult invitation into a deeper and as yet unrecognizable form of affection. Loving, it seems, always becomes a path of humble apprenticeship, not only in following its difficult way and discovering its different forms of humility and beautiful abasement but strangely, through its fierce introduction to its many astonishing and different forms, where we are asked continually and against our will, to give in so many different ways, without knowing exactly, in what way, or even when, the gift will be returned.

– November Thoughts, ©David Whyte, 2013

Found at Nonduality Highlights