From The Innkeepers

It’s Still Possible-
A Blog for November 2024

As the calendar flips to a new month and the end of the year looms on a close in horizon, we can easily get caught up into the vortex of yearend holidays, and the kicking into high gear of our seemingly endless “to do” lists.   For example: the state of my gardening “take down” chores, that need more pairs of hands and more hours than seem to be available right now.  Add to that the layer of getting ready to move eight months from now, and a real panic could ensue if I allowed it to go there.  Just in a nick of time however, I came across a poem from one of my favorite poets: David Whyte.  Sometimes synchronicity can save us.  The title of this poem is “It’s Still Possible”.   I don’t think he meant that in relationship to our “to do” lists, regardless of the level of importance that we have attached to them.  In this poem he asks us to dwell in “possibility” on a much deeper level.

It’s Still Possible by David Whyte

It’s still possible to fully understand

you have always been the place

where the miracle has happened:

that you have been since your birth,

the bread given and the wine lifted,

the change witnessed and the change itself,

that you have secretly been, all along,

a goodness that can continue

to be a goodness to itself.

It’s still possible in the end

to realize why you are here

and why you have endured,

and why you might have suffered

so much, that in the end,

you could witness love, miraculously

arriving from nowhere, crossing

bravely as it does, out of darkness,

from that great and spacious stillness

inside you, to the simple,

light-filled life of being said.

David Whyte uses his words and the craft of his poetic language to support the quest for meaning to our lives, to teach us to focus on a larger awareness, rather than focusing on the minutia of our days.  We live through the mundane in order to arrive at the important things like self-worth, purpose, and witnessing love.  We realize that we can be that “goodness that is a goodness” unto itself, as he so beautifully stated.

With the awareness of the words in the poem “It’s Still Possible”, it is with gratitude that I pause and re-group for the coming days, weeks, and months.  I search within for that state of awareness that is necessary to shelter a grateful heart.  For gratitude is not meant to be a “Pavlovian” response pursuant to a gift we have been given.  Gratitude arises within us only from a posture of paying attention, from shaking ourselves awake into a state of awareness.  It is very much an attitude of presence in the present moment.  I would go so far as to say that our understanding of what is still possible for us is tightly linked to our ability to be present and in that presence to perceive the world through the lens of gratefulness.

In the coming month and especially on this Thanksgiving holiday, we wish many blessings to you and those you love, your families of origin and your families of choice.

Marcia, Pat, Sharon, and Ryan

Keepers of the Rustic Gate