Turn sideways into the light

Isn't that a beautiful line? "Turn sideways into the light." It's from a Celtic myth about some amazing tribe of people who went into battle knowing they would be defeated. They stood facing the enemy and as the enemy charged toward them, they turned sideways into the light and disappeared.

I also like "Be impatient with easy explanations / and teach that part of the mind / that wants to know everything / not to begin questions it cannot answer." More and more it gives me peace not to try to solve everything, not to try to find the answer to every question. That place where you live in an unanswered question is often called tense, but it seems like there can be a point of balance where the tension goes away.

David wrote this poem after visiting "the well of Patrick overlooking Galway Bay." He said it is a favorite spot of his and many others, "a place of silence and respite, inviting you to make a friend of silence, the spaciousness of silence."

TOBAR PHADRAIC

Turn sideways into the light as they say
the old ones did and disappear
into the originality of it all.

Be impatient with easy explanations
and teach that part of the mind
that wants to know everything
not to begin questions it cannot answer.

Walk the green road above the bay
and the low glinting fields
toward the evening sun, let that Atlantic
gleam be ahead of you and the gray light
of the bay below you, until you catch,
down on your left, the break in the wall,
for just above in the shadows
you’ll find it hidden, a curved arm
of rock holding the water close to the mountain,
a just-lit surface smoothing a scattering of coins,
and in the niche above, notes to the dead
and supplications for those who still live
.
But for now, you are alone with the transfiguration
and ask no healing for your own
but look down as if looking through time,
as if through a rent veil from the other
side of the question you’ve refused to ask.

And you remember now, that clear stream
of generosity from which you drank,
how as a child your arms could rise and your palms
turn out to take the blessing of the world.

TOBAR PHADRAIC
In RIVER FLOW: New and Selected Poems
© David Whyte and Many Rivers Press