Musings and Thoughts on Doll making and other related ideas

November 21, 2013

Collage made while at David Whyte retreat. The tree is of the "shape that waits in the seed of you to grow and spread its branches against a future sky. The crown and creature on the left also come from images in his poetry. The crown represents the "strategic mind's" attempts to control one's life and the creature is like the shadow self that doesn't want to be anniliated during the process of change. At least that's what I got from it so far

Let Your Vulnerabilities…be a Faculty for Understanding

Weekend with David Whyte

http://www.davidwhyte.com/poetry.html

https://www.facebook.com/pages/David-Whyte

Last weekend I heard renowned poet and storyteller David Whyte at Kripalu. In my doll making I am examining the themes of change and transformation. Knowing that these are central themes in his poems, I was excited to hear what he had to say about them. I want to share some of my impressions from this amazing weekend with you.

Let your vulnerabilities walking on the cracked limestone

Be this time not a weakness

But a faculty for understanding

For what’s about to happen.

sketch I made during his lecture on this idea of vulnerability as a faculty for understanding with other ideas as well

This, from Whyte’s poem, The Seven Seas, hit home with me because it fit so closely with the vulnerability I was exploring in my Rhea doll. She smiles compassionately as she stands naked and holding the shed skin of her outworn identity. It is comforting to reframe vulnerability as a faculty for understanding, as a strength.

Talisman doll Rhea, two feet tall, with her shed skin, in my studio

He says, in Start Close In

Start close in

Don’t take the second step

Or the third,

Start with the first thing

Close in,

The step

You don’t want to take.

Start with the ground

You know,

The pale ground

Beneath your feet,

Your own

Way of starting

The conversation.

His understanding of transformation and change is much simpler and yet more dangerous than what we might think. Instead of something out there, some goal we have to reach, it is right here, in the next “courageous conversation” we are ready to take, with ourselves, with our friends and loved ones, and with our work.  And transformation isn’t something we do, but instead something that happens to us once we fully immerse ourselves in that conscious conversation with life.

He asked us over the weekend to consider some “beautiful questions” including “what temporary name do I want to live under this weekend?” and what if we could imagine the presence of our future self in a tiny seed and ask:

What shape

waits in the seed

of you to grow

and spread

it’s branches

against a future sky?”

 from the poem, What to Remember when Waking.

The end of the weekend was a powerful testament to the ways in which participants were affected. One woman said she used to feel that she would be annihilated by grief when her terminally ill parents died but now, (after this weekend) though she knows she will be annihilated she knows it would be ok.

It’s in the dangerousness of life, the way in which we are all somehow on the precipice of that next step that we are afraid to take, that the real living begins. Yet, we are held and guided by invisible help. Even the teapots have something to say to us. Here is the end of his poem Everything is Waiting for You.

Put down the weight of your aloneness

And ease into the conversation.

The kettle is singing

Even as it pours you a drink,

The Cooking pots

Have left their arrogant aloofness and

Seen the good in you at last.

All the birds and creatures of the world are unutterably

Themselves.

Everything is waiting for you.

another sketch while listening to his talk..."become the ancestor of it all"