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All the True Vows by David Whyte (1955 - ) Timeline Original Language English Secular or Eclectic Contemporary All the true vows are secret vows the ones we speak out loud are the ones we break. There is only one life you can call your own and a thousand others you can call by any name you want. Hold to the truth you make every day with your own body, don't turn your face away. Hold to your own truth at the center of the image you were born with. Those who do not understand their destiny will never understand the friends they have made nor the work they have chosen nor the one life that waits beyond all the others. By the lake in the wood in the shadows you can whisper that truth to the quiet reflection you see in the water. Whatever you hear from the water, remember, it wants you to carry the sound of its truth on your lips. Remember, in this place no one can hear you and out of the silence you can make a promise it will kill you to break, that way you'll find what is real and what is not. I know what I am saying. Time almost forsook me and I looked again. Seeing my reflection I broke a promise and spoke for the first time after all these years in my own voice, before it was too late to turn my face again. "All the True Vows" from The House of Belonging by David Whyte.  Copyright © 1997, 2004 by David Whyte.  Used by permission of the author and Many Rivers Press (www.davidwhyte.com)  All rights reserved.       / Photo by jenny downing /	Themes   Birth, Rebirth   Death   Silence   Sound   Water
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Commentary by Ivan M. Granger

I read this poem by David Whyte as a meditation on the alienation most people feel from their own lives. Too often we aren't really present in our own lives. "There is only one life / you can call your own..."

He is saying that something powerful, even sacred, occurs when we stop contorting ourselves to reach for the lives that are not our own. When we settle into ourselves, when we start to actually live our own lives, embody our own lives, we not only begin to really experience life deeply for the first time, we start to tap into "the one life that waits / beyond all others."

Living this way, we find our true face, our true reflection.

I especially like the ending verses: "Seeing my reflection / I broke a promise / and spoke / for the first time / after all these years // in my own voice."

To rediscover our own voice, our true voice which has been socialized back into the shadows of our awareness, we have to break an old agreement, a "promise." We must decide to no longer identify with the roles and expectations set up for us by family, friends, and our own past actions. Finally dropping all of those masks, we discover our true face, our "reflection." Then, "for the first time," we can finally speak in our own voice.

Worth reading more than once...

Ivan M. Granger's original poetry, stories and commentaries are Copyright © 2002 - 2009 by Ivan M. Granger.
All other material is copyrighted by the respective authors, translators and/or publishers.