Some New Delight
The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of the depths. These persons have an appreciation, a sensitivity, and an understanding of life that fills them with compassion, gentleness, and a deep loving concern. Beautiful people do not just happen.
~ Elizabeth Kubler Ross
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This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they are a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.
The dark thought, the shame, the malice.
meet them at the door laughing and invite them in.
Be grateful for whatever comes.
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.
~ Rumi, Coleman Barks
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Letting there be room for not knowing is the most important thing of all. When there’s a big disappointment, we don’t know if that’s the end of the story. It may just be the beginning of a great adventure. Life is like that. We don’t know anything. We call something bad; we call it good. But really we just don’t know.
~ Pema Chödrön
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I wonder if that’s true, that beautiful people don’t just happen. Are they smelted by their tragedies? Do unbeautiful people live a more coddled life or do they just react to their injuries differently? Some people do seem more naturally sensitive and kind than the norm. Some children suffer more and feel empathy more readily than other children.
And yet, I do think that we can gain a larger perspective from our personal misfortunes if we’re capable of extrapolating from how we ourselves feel to how someone else might feel. It’s strange, bordering on incomprehensible, that so many people in our society are so ready to punish people who are already suffering. Does that come from lack of education, lack of imagination or lack of empathy?
It’s a mystery why some humans learn from their pain and some people don’t. Some people become better humans and some people become worse. We all go through a kind of spiritual alchemy in our lifetime, starting from our first day on earth. Why do some people, like Trump for instance, double down on the worst human impulses?
If we could see the follow-on effects of our smallness and pettiness would we desist? First you have to care, you have to be capable of caring. That’s where the beautiful people depart from the unbeautiful ones, where they contribute healing instead of more misfortune.
The political situation in America right now dramatizes this dichotomy. One side wants to punish and repress and one side wants to heal and offer aid. My question is, why is there even a question of what would be better for our society and ultimately the world? Is this a question of personal evolution projected onto the political sphere?
How we imagine personal benefit needs to be put into a larger context. It needs to be understood within the picture of the greatest good for the whole society, which of course ultimately depends on the permission of the natural world. Not seeing that and thinking we can thrive and be successful in violation of that simple equation puts human civilization in mortal danger.
The crowd of sorrows Rumi talks about is inevitable not only because we know so little of our fate, but also because we don’t want to have to care about the family of beings we belong to. We don’t even want to think there is such a thing as a family of beings. We deceive ourselves with a small personal perspective on our earthly existence. If the world is to survive, that perspective has to grow larger.
I just hope it’s not going to come through catastrophe and pain.
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Here are three reviews of my writing:
David Price has become one of my favorite writers once I discovered his work on the Medium site a few years ago. I’m amazed at how he continually is able to spark my consciousness with thoughts, ideas and observations of our world and the range of possibilities in the human experience. The best way to sum it up might be to say that through his words and images, Mr Price has a knack for providing rich sustenance for the human soul.
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Insightful and eloquent musings on the human condition
A regular contributor on Medium, David Price’s articles caught my attention a couple of years ago. Combined with stunning artwork — some of which is his own — and often wonderful quotes from celebrated sources, his daily submissions became a fixture with my morning coffee. He combines an almost poetic prose with razor-sharp insights into the state of humanity and the world we’ve created. Time and again I’ve been thoroughly impressed by his views of the state of things, both the good and the bad, views that will often follow me around all day. This book is a collection of a number of his articles, and I highly recommend it.
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This book encourages in the true sense of that word as no other I have known the creative process in oneself as spiritual necessity. David Price’s writing is beautifully alive, articulate, kind. The form is prose; the feel is poetic, flowing, metaphoric. There is not a dry line in it. I heartily recommend it to anyone who longs to crack the shell around their own creativity, to become more sensitive, creative, and alive themselves.
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Plus this comment:
There is something about your writing, an ineffable quality I can’t quite place. It’s brilliant.
— Shain Thomas
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It is this version:
