To Break A Promise
To Break A Promise
by David Whyte
Make a place of prayer, no fuss now,
just lean into the white brilliance
and say what you needed to say
all along, nothing too much, words
as simple and as yours and as heard
as the bird song above your head
or the river running gently beside you.
Let your words join one to another
the way stone nestles on stone,
the way water just leaves
and goes to the sea,
the way your promise
breathes and belongs
with every other promise
the world has ever made.
Now, let them go on,
leave your words
to carry their own life
without you, let the promise
go with the river.
Stand up now. Have faith. Walk away.
Excerpt from David Whyte’s book Essentials about “To Break A Promise”.
Everywhere in our religious and artistic traditions, we are told how to make and hold to promises, and yet there is almost nothing in our literature to help us in the necessary art of breaking outworn, misguided, or out-of-season bonds that are now obscuring the underlying vow that led us to the commitment in the first place. Breaking promises is something most human beings have to do often, in order to remain true to the deeper underlying current of their lives and, just as often, the lives of those to whom they made the promise: but it is not something we often do well. This poem was written for a letting go that happened in the right kind of way, walking away from a promise that was no longer a promise for the future but an imprisoning bond to an abstract past.
This poem could also live under the alternative title of 'To Make a Promise, a radical human act that calls for the same kind of leaning into the interior 'white brilliance' of truth as any promise we may have made. In the making of a necessary promise or in the necessary breaking of a promise, when we do find the core living words that speak for where we need to go or how we need to be, the words themselves have their own power, their own sweet way to take us on; and a need to be left alone to have their own life as a promise themselves, as an invitational mystery, an emblem of our courage, something thereafter to be lived up to and into.
