David Whyte: Blessing For the Morning Light

 BLESSING FOR THE MORNING LIGHT

(For John O’Donohue)

The blessing of the morning light to you,
may it find you even in your invisible
appearances, may you be seen to have risen
from some other place you know and have known
in the darkness and that that carries all you need.

May you see what is hidden in you
as a place of hospitality and shadowed shelter,
may what is hidden in you become your gift to give,
may you hold that shadow to the light
and the silence of that shelter to the word of the light,
may you join every previous disappearance
with this new appearance, this new morning,
this being seen again, new and newly alive.

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BLESSING FOR THE MORNING LIGHT
in DAVID WHYTE: ESSENTIALS
© David Whyte and Many Rivers Press

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ROSE COLOURED DAWN
Saint Saturnin-Les -Apts. Provence.
Photo © David Whyte
September 16th 2018
https://davidwhyte.com/.../products/david-whyte-essentials
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BLESSING FOR THE LIGHT

Perhaps there is nothing we take more for granted than the everyday light delineating our world and the faces of our loved ones, though so often, when we fall away from ourselves, we appreciate only its ability to outline all our grounds for complaint. There is also the radical way that light finds us anew every morning, illuminating, if we are willing to look deeply enough and silently enough, what was previously hidden. A reminder and a blessing therefore. for those most basic ways; and at the same time those most astounding physical and beyond physical ways that light forms both our self-understandings and our perceptions of this world. A blessing for the light.

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In Memoriam : John O’Donohue

John and I would often joke about the well attested Irish reluctance to rise early in the morning: and he himself was a great lover of ‘a good lie-in’. But many a year on Easter morning, John would rise willingly before the sun rose to lead a dawn Morning Mass at the ancient ruined monastery of Corcomroe, in County Clare, where many hundreds would join him and his genius ability to bless: to greet the sun, to praise the risen light, or often, to bless the rainy misted Irish morning setting in from the west. This piece was written late at night in the Pacific Northwest, but just as dawn would be breaking over the ruins of Corcomroe, far away in County Clare : an homage to the morning light, to John’s extraordinary voice coming out of nowhere and to his generous spirit, his ability to originate and give a home to that most difficult and necessary of disciplines, the art of blessing. DW

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