Ambition

is a word that lacks any real ambition. Ambition is desire frozen, the current of a vocational life immobilised and over-concretised to set unforgiving goals. Ambition may be essential for the young and as yet unrealised life, but becomes the essential obstacle of any mature life. Ambition abstracts us from the underlying elemental nature of the creative conversation while providing us the cover of a target that has become false through over-description, overfamiliarity or too much understanding.

The ease of having an ambition is that it can be explained to others; the very disease of ambition is that it can be so easily explained to others. What is worthy of a life’s dedication does not want to be known by us in ways that diminish its actual sense of presence. Everything true to itself has its own secret language and an internal intentionality with a secret, surprising flow, even to the person who supposedly puts it all in motion.

Ambition ultimately withers all secrets in its glare before those secrets have had time to come to life from within, and then thwarts the generosity and maturity that ripens the discourse of a lifetime’s dedication to a work.

We may direct the beam of ambition to illuminate a certain corner of the future world, but ultimately it can reveal to us only those dreams with which we have already become familiar. Ambition left to itself, like the identity of the average billionaire, always becomes tedious, its only object the creation of larger and larger empires of control; but a true vocation calls us out beyond ourselves, breaks our heart in the process and then humbles, simplifies and enlightens us about the hidden, core nature of the work that enticed us in the first place. We find that, all along, we had what we needed from the beginning and that in the end we have returned to its essence, an essence we could not understand until we had experienced the actual heartbreak of the journey.

No matter the self-conceited importance of our labours we are all compost for worlds we cannot yet imagine. Ambition takes us toward that horizon, but not over it – that line will always recede before our controlling hands. But a calling is a conversation between our physical bodies, our work, our intellects and imaginations, and a new world that is itself the territory we seek. A vocation always includes the specific, heartrending way we will fail at our attempt to live fully. A true vocation always metamorphoses both ambition and failure into compassion and understanding for others.

Ambition takes willpower and constant applications of energy to stay on a perceived bearing; but a serious vocational calling demands a constant attention to the unknown gravitational field that surrounds us and from which we recharge ourselves, as if breathing from the atmosphere of possibility itself. A life’s work is not a series of stepping-stones, onto which we calmly place our feet, but more like an ocean crossing where there is no path, only a heading, a direction, in conversation with the elements. Looking back, we see the wake we have left as only a brief glimmering trace on the waters.

Ambition is natural to the first steps of youth, who must experience its essential falsity to know the larger reality that stands behind it, but held on to too long, and especially in eldership, it always comes to lack surprise, turns the last years of the ambitious into a second childhood, and makes the once successful into an object of pity.

The authentic watermark running through the background of a life’s work is an arrival at generosity and, as a mark of that generosity, delight in the hopes of the young: and the giving away to them, not only of rewards that may have been earned but the reward in the secret itself, the core artistry that made the journey a journey.

Perhaps the greatest legacy we can leave from our work is not to instil ambition in others, though this may be the first way we describe its arrival in our life, but the passing on of a sense of sheer privilege, of having found a road, a way to follow, and then having been allowed to walk it, often with others, with all its difficulties and minor triumphs; the underlying primary gift of having been both a witness to and a full participant in the conversation.

-from Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words: Revised Edition

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Dougie

My uncle Dougie
was killed
on Sword Beach,
the 6th of June,
nineteen hundred
and forty four.

The cadence
of the date
like a slow chant
in my father’s mind
round the one
central memory.

Dougie taught
him how to swim
before he died.

There are other words
still said
in unassuming
reverence
when our heads bend
over the letters
and you remake
and relive

the familiar loss,
as if forging his absence
new again,
each phrase measured
by its careful
placement in silence.

His regiment,
The East Yorkshires
I remember since
childhood and,
your Grandma and Grandpa
didn’t know for months,
and now in final silence
the bleak
unnatural
and late arriving telegram
folded
and unfolded
down fifty years.

Sometimes I know
my father is
a young boy again
and Dougie,
teaching him how to swim,
has suddenly turned away
as if in a dream
and looks toward
France.

Then he is low down
in the water
near the horrific shore
and my father’s arms
so recently taught
to live in that element
are reaching
to pull him back.

But the weighted surge
of his elder
brother’s
pack and rifle

pull too much
for the young boy’s arms.

Now I remember
my father’s repeated
weekend need
for the ice cold waters
where he taught me
how to swim
and his fatherly
satisfaction
at the slowly
growing strokes
that kept his son
above water.

I could not know what
was being given then
not knowing
how as the years pass
we must always strike
boldly to save those close to us,
hold them
above the drowning water
with our words,
so they live again,

if not the man,
then the loved
memory,

father to son,
brother to brother,
hand dipping in the water
toward shore,
saving them
now
as we could not then,
phrase by repeated phrase.


-from The House of Belonging 

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Santiago

The road seen, then not seen, the hillside hiding
then revealing the way you should take, the road
dropping away from you as if leaving you to walk
on thin air, then catching you, holding you up,
when you thought you would fall, and the way
forward always in the end the way that you follo…

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The Bell Ringer

Consider the bell
ringer as an image
of the human soul,
he stands foursquare
on the stone flagged
ground, and surrounded
by a circle of communal
concentration
searches in his fixed
aloneness
for a world
beyond straight,
human,
eye to eye
discourse,
in this case
above him,
the collision of metal
worlds chiming
to each bend and lift
of the knees,
letting his weight
bear down
on the rope,
creating out of the heave
and upward pull,
a hollowed out
brass utterance,
a resonant
on-going argument
for his continued presence,
independent
of daily mood
or the necessities
for a verbal
proclamation.

Consider the reason
for his continued
attendance
to the art.
Caught in a committed
circle of constant practice
yet freed in the vertical
from a horizontal
ever present
and exhausting
human participation,
the ultimate arbitration
an over arching,
straight-out
relationship
with sound.

Somewhere above
in the vertical
he touches
another firmament,
his face
lined, preoccupied
or even set
against the world,
can still announce joy
in the sweet resonance
of birth,
or drama
in the long,
extended,
over and over
carillions of
marriage.

No matter
the clarity
or cloudiness
of the day,
he can follow
that out-going tide
of sound right
to the very edge
of the circled
horizon
until it ebbs back
around him
into the center
of things,
pooling
to a more
rhythmic toll,
a deeper,
more concentrated
commemoration,
the knelling way
the world sounds
inside
when
we’ve heard
the ease and release
of a last breath.

Let him stand there
then
for the human soul,
let his weight
come true on the rope,
the way we want to lean
into the center of things,
the way we want to
fall with the gravity
of the situation
and then afterwards
laugh and
defy it with an
upward ultimately
untraceable flight,
a great ungovernable
ringing
announcement
to the world
that
something, somewhere,
has changed.

Consider
the bellringer
as one of us,
attempting some
unachieved,
magnificent
difference in the world,
far above
and far beyond
the stone-closed
space
we seem
to occupy.

Below
we’re all
effort, listening
and willful concentration,
above,
like a moving sea,
another power
shoulders
just for a moment
the whole burden,
lifts us
against our will,
lets us find
in the skyward pull
a needed antidote
to surface noise,
a gravity against gravity,
a sky shot through stone, a clear note,
another way to hear
amid
the clamor of the heavens.


-from Everything is Waiting for You

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Everything is Waiting for You

The hidden beauty of endings almost always lives in the letting go.

Letting Go: Finding the Secret, Hidden Beauty in Every Ending

The ending of relationships, the ending of friendships, the ending of a work, a conversation that is making us smaller, a book we are trying to write, or even a single line of a poem: all of them difficult, all of them, in their particular form of ending, necessary. We find most endings difficult and nearly all of them hurtful and traumatic and yet almost always afterwards, after each ending, we find we would never voluntarily reverse things and go back to our old life.

The poet Rilke said, “Be ahead of all parting” as an invitation to a radically anticipatory way of living that is just as committed to letting go as it is to taking on.

The stakes are always high in every letting go and every ending. The way we leave can shape our new life to the good or to the bad. In the very seed of the ending and the integrity with which we make the passage from old to new, grows the fresh and vibrant life that emerges so surprisingly from our difficult moving on.

The ability to anticipate these new arrivals and hold to what is firm and true through all our successive experiences of falling apart is exactly what makes a foundation for a new life, a new home, a new love or a new work. The hidden beauty of endings almost always lives in the letting go. What is marvelous and truly beautiful in a new life always arises from what is initially invisible, from what seems like a secret; from what is hidden, both inside us and in the very physical world into which we are stepping.

Letting go clears the way to seeing more clearly what was there all along.

Join me for Three Sundays in July, to look at all the visible and invisible endings that mark a human life and that, when approached with the right insight, the right perspective and often surprisingly small but courageous acts of letting go, provide us with the new beginning we need.

Live virtual sessions for Letting Go will take place on July 12th, 19th and 26th. Session recordings and resources will be made available for all registered attendees until December 1st, 2026.

Paid Substack subscribers receive $35 off the cost of registration. If you are a paid Substack subscriber, and have not received a discount code in email for the July 2026 Series, contact support@davidwhyte.com and someone will be happy to assist you.

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Note: If you have not registered for a Three Sundays Series on davidwhyte.com website, you will need to create a username and password in order to register and access the series resource materials.

With anticipation,

and all of us at Many Rivers

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The Revised Edition of The House of Belonging is newly designed in a smaller travel-friendly format and contains the latest text of the poems.

The Hawthorn

The crossed knot
in the hawthorn bark
and the stump
of the sawn off branch
hemmed by
the roughened trunk.
In that
omniscient black eye
of witness
I see the dark no-growth
of what has passed
grown round by
what has come to pass,
looking at me
as if I could speak.

So much that was
good in her,
so much in me,
cut off now
from the future
in which we
grew together.

Now
through the window
of my new house
that hawthorn’s
crooked faithful
trunk round
an old and broken
growth,
my mouth dumb
and
Dante’s voice
instead of mine
from the open book.

Brother, our love
has laid our wills to rest.
Making us long
only for what is ours
and by no other thirst
possessed.

Our life not lived
together
must still
live on apart,
longing only
for what is ours
alone,
each grow
round the missed branch
as best we can,
claim what is ours
separately,
though not forget
loved memories,
nor that life
still loved by memory,
nor the hurts
through which we
hesitantly
tried to learn
affection.

Our pilgrim journey
apart or together,
like the thirst
of everything
to find its true form,
the grain of the wood
round the hatched knot
still straightening
toward the light.


-from The House of Belonging: Revised Edition

Sometimes what we learn from a parting of ways lies in the very sadness and poignancy of the leaving itself. Once so together, now so far apart and yet still somehow forever living in an unspoken parallel: what was brought into the world somehow still alive not only in our separate lives but also in what our former togetherness bequeathed to the world... DW

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Our hours are numerous on this earth, but a real appreciation for most of those hours is rare. Our overemphasis on the productions of time and motion obscures the magic and spaciousness of the hours themselves, which are born again and again irrespective of whether they are worked or no. When we work only to do, we most often find ourselves helplessly doing again without having placed the first doing in any context. What has been done is simply replaced by a new thing to be done; the years fly by until that strange day when all the doing suddenly has to stop; in retirement, in illness, in bereavement, in death itself.

Without an appreciation of the hours of life, we are simply a target for our own incoming death, which approaches us like a missile programmed to the signature of our own fears. Living the hours spaciously, where we actually have a relationship with silence and timelessness, death is more like a difficult conversation that we join voluntarily, and in a good death—as in a good life—we have a hand in shaping that conversation.

Most traditional human cultures have seen the hours of the days in the same way as they have encountered the seasons of the year: not as clear lines drawn across our experience, but as an advancing quality, a presence, a visitation, and an emergence of something growing inside us as much as it is growing in the outer world. A season or an hour of the day is a visitation whose return is not always assured. Every spring following a long winter feels as miraculous as if we are seeing it for the first time. Out of the dead garden rises abundance beyond a winter eye’s comprehension.

The hours and the seasons are sometimes a flowering, sometimes a disappearance, and often an indistinguishable transience between the two, but all the hours of the day and the seasons of the year enunciate some quality in the world that has its own time and place. To make friends with the hours is to come to know all the hidden correspondences inside our own bodies that match the richness and movement of life we see around us. The tragedy of constant scheduling in our work is its mechanical effect on the hours, and subsequently on our bodies, reducing the spectrum of our individual character and color to a gray sameness. Every hour left to itself has its mood and difference, a quality that should change us and re-create us according to its effect upon us.

In many traditional cultures, a particular hour of the day is seen to have a personal, almost angelic presence, something that might be named - though only in hushed tones, and only in ways that reinforce its unknowingness. The Benedictine, Brother David Steindl-Rast, defines an angel as the eternal breaking into time, each particular breakthrough of the numinous utterly extraordinary and utterly itself. Time and each hour of time is a season, almost a personality, with its own annunciation, its own song, its whispering of what is to be born in us. Its appearance like a new conversation in which we are privileged to overhear ourselves participating.

To escape from the prison of time is to grant the hours their own life; to uncurl the iron grip of our hand on any given moment while at the same time finding the ability to be more present, more robust, more open to our own self-evident absurdities, while continuing the conversation.

A healthy relationship with time is an exact template of a healthy relationship between two human beings. When we make a good marriage with time, we instantly apprentice ourselves to the improvement of our character just as we do marrying another person.

No matter what the New Age gurus may have said, we do not make our own reality. We have a modest part in it, depending on how alive we are to the way the currents and eddies of time are running. Reality is the conversation between ourselves and the never-ending productions of time. The closer we are to the source of the productions of time—that is, to the eternal—the more easily we understand the particular currents we must navigate on any given day.

If we want to understand the particulars of our reality, we must understand the way we conduct our daily relationship with the hours. In the hours is the secret to the workday, and in every workday the manner of our marriage to the hours and subsequently, our journey through the day, is crucial to the happiness we desire.

-excerpts from Crossing the Unknown Sea: Work as a Pilgrimage of Identity

Regarding the photo above, taken at my friend Lori’s house in Tuscany, I have always loved hanging clothes out to dry in the summer breezes; probably because I helped my mother do the same when I was young, though just as often if I recall, I would be running out in a happy panic, to bring them in from a sudden north country shower. There was something about the way the slowly drying sheets were an undulating, literally moving connection with the sky and the clouds and the passing weather, slowly taking on that distinct, heady smell of sunlight, somehow marking the hours as they dried, slowly or astonishingly quickly depending on the heat of the sun and the strength of the breeze. Their white wave like forms glimpsed outside the windows, a background music to the day. DW

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Paid subscribers receive $35 off the registration fee of $75 for the series. If you are a paid subscriber and have not received a coupon code, write to support@davidwhyte.com and someone will be happy to assist you.

Register for "The Creative Path"

The Creative Path

Carrying What is Hidden as a Gift to Others

The difficult secret about creativity is that it is an invitation to travel the path of longing—longing for real meaning, real connection, and continual nourishing surprise that can enliven and even transform the lives of others.

We associate creativity with discipline and long hours but long hours make sense only if we are following a meaningful central trajectory—one that in the creative act itself seems to issue from our bodies like a comet’s tail out into the world.

Creativity is an invitation to transgress—once we take the step toward creating, we always betray our known self and the inherited stories we hold close, the scaffolding of our entire identity, and the structures and systems that held us in place. This is why it feels so difficult. This is why we feel as if we are ‘blocked’, we really, actually feel as if we are losing our sense of self. This is why the creative path can feel so distant and elusive: to create is to betray your home and set off into a distant unknown place.

Creativity demands choosing longing over belonging: that choice asks us to risk losing grip with what makes sense—to drop into a state where the familiar self cannot follow a known path. So many things can be created easily and unconsciously—chaos, resentment, envy—even destruction—can be created on a daily basis without effort or intention. Meaningful creativity is something else entirely—it puts us in cultivated, intimate companionship with the world and with the struggles of other human beings—fellow creatures trying to get things right and failing awkwardly most of the time.

To follow the path of creativity is to stay in the unknown long enough for it to become aliveness—and to shape that aliveness into forms of beauty and life-changing insight—the gift of being given new eyes or ears for this world or even a new mind for an imagined future. These dreams beneath the surface made real through our creative gifts, are the fruits of a long and conscious path—a harvest that asks us to keep listening to the inner urgencies of our life—and the way those urgencies arrive in all the hours of our everyday lives.

Bringing our inner and outer worlds together is the theme of these three Sundays in May. Following a creative path that always asks us to shape a way of being equal to every mode of doing.

In the third Sunday of the series, I will be joined by Rick Rubin, producer and interpretive maestro for so many famous musicians of all genres, but also the best-selling author of The Creative Act: A Way of Being. Rick has interviewed me in many of his own Tetragrammaton podcasts and is now willing to take some of his own good medicine on the Three Sundays Series!

Explore past Three Sundays Series:

March 2026: "The Cost of Love"

Jan 2026: "The Invitational Identity"

Trees

In writing about trees
the hand
should burst a thousand leaves
on the page
or spread in silhouette
the curled branches
between words

so that as we read
the white hollows between words
can be the wind
or in certain poems, stillness
so that as eyes
descend the page, smoke rises
straight
toward heaven

as the lines descend down
to the roots
the page is straining
so that the lower square of paper
seethes with immensity
unable to be moved, only tugged
or hurled massively over
when the page turns
when the hand does touch
the paper
the feeling of age
is immediate
the feel of wood
grains the forehead
or curves the back
like mountain ash
tenacious
between stones

by the last line
we sink our weight
through dreams of earth
holding the ground for a hundred
years of time
unable to forget
a promise with the land
to breathe
and with our arms
hold heaven close to earth.


-from Songs for Coming Home

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Written out of that very physical and almost breathless giving away most human beings feel, when they must let go of what seems most precious to them, not knowing how or when it will return, in what form or in what voice - that taking away of the light walking through divorce or separation, through bereavement or through simply not recognizing the person looking back at us in the mirror.

Sweet Darkness was written in a kind of defiant praise of this difficult time of not knowing, a letter of invitation to embrace the beauty of the night and of the foundational human experience of not being able to see, as actually another horizon, and perhaps the only horizon out of which a truly new revelation can emerge. The last line cuts both ways of course, we ourselves have often helped to make everything and everyone around us, far too small, by our lack of faith in not knowing, by all the ways we are not holding the conversation. - DW

Sweet Darkness

When your eyes are tired,
the world is tired also.

When your vision has gone,
no part of the world can find you.

Time to go into the dark
where the night has eyes
to recognize its own.

There you can be sure
you are not beyond love.

The dark will be your home
tonight.

The night will give you a horizon
further than you can see.

You must learn one thing.
The world was made to be free in.

Give up all the other worlds
except the one to which you belong.

Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet
confinement of your aloneness
to learn

anything or anyone
that does not bring you alive

is too small for you.


   -from The House of Belonging

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Ten Years Later

When the mind is clear
and the surface of the now still,
now swaying water

slaps against
the rolling kayak,

I find myself near darkness
paddling again to Yellow Island.

Every spring wildflowers
cover the grey rocks.

Every year the sea breeze
ruffles the cold and lovely pearls
hidden in the center of the flowers

as if remembering them
by touch alone.

A calm and lonely, trembling beauty
that frightened me in youth.

Now their loneliness
feels familiar, one small thing
I’ve learned these years,

how to be alone,
and at the edge of aloneness
how to be found by the world.

Innocence is what we allow
to be gifted back to us
once we’ve given ourselves away.

There is one world only,
the one to which we gave ourselves
utterly, and to which one day

we are blessed to return.


-from The House of Belonging 

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There is a dark art, unbridled in its own life, and untouched by the writer, hidden behind the workmanship of good poetry. The ancient Ogham script of the British Isles seems to hold, in its rough, incised simplicity in stone or wood, a surfacing of that hidden force. In the bardic world, the first lines of every poem held in the mem…

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If a fool would persist in his folly, he would become wise

— William Blake

Register for the May 2026 Series

Three Sundays in May with Special Guest, Rick Rubin

The difficult secret about creativity is that it is an invitation to travel the path of longing—longing for real meaning, real connection, and continual nourishing surprise that can enliven and even transform the lives of others.

We associate creativity with discipline and long hours but long hours make sense only if we are following a meaningful central trajectory—one that in the creative act itself seems to issue from our bodies like a comet’s tail out into the world.

Creativity is an invitation to transgress—once you take the step toward creating, we always betray our known self and the inherited stories we hold close, the scaffolding of our entire identity, and the structures and systems that held us in place. This is why it feels so difficult. This is why we feel as if we are ‘blocked’, we really, actually feel as if we are losing our sense of self. This is why the creative path can feels so distant and elusive: to create is to betray your home and set off into a distant unknown place.

Creativity demands choosing longing over belonging: that choice asks us to risk losing grip with what makes sense—to drop into a state where the familiar self cannot follow a known path. So many things can be created easily and unconsciously—chaos. Resentment, envy—even destruction—can be created on a daily basis without effort or intention. Meaningful creativity is something else entirely—it puts us in cultivated, intimate companionship with the world and with the struggles of other human beings—fellow creatures trying to get things right and failing awkwardly most of the time.

To follow the path of creativity is to stay in the unknown long enough for it to become aliveness—and to shape that aliveness into forms of beauty and life-changing insight—the gift of being given new eyes or ears for this world or even a new mind for an imagined future. These dreams beneath the surface made real through our creative gifts, are the fruits of a long and conscious path—a harvest that asks us to keep listening to the inner urgencies our life—and the way those urgencies arrive in all the hours of our everyday lives.

Bringing our inner and outer worlds together is the theme of these three Sundays in May. Following a creative path that always asks us to shape a way of being equal to every mode of doing.

In the third Sunday of the series, David will be joined by , producer and interpretive maestro for so many famous musicians of all genres, but also the best selling author of The Creative Act: A Way of Being. Rick has interviewed David in many of his own Tetragrammaton podcasts and is now willing to take some of his own good medicine on the Three Sundays Series.

Register for the May 2026 Series

Live virtual sessions for The Creative Path: Carrying What is Hidden as a Gift to Others will take place on May 10th, 17th and 24th. Session recordings and resources will be made available for all registered attendees until October 1st, 2026.

Paid Substack subscribers receive $35 off the cost of registration. If you are a paid Substack subscriber, and have not received a discount code in email for the May 2026 Series, contact support@davidwhyte.com and someone will be happy to assist you.

Note: If you have not registered for a Three Sundays Series on davidwhyte.com website, you will need to create a username and password in order to register and access the series resource materials.

With anticipation,

and all of us at Many Rivers

Subscribe now

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Written in my late twenties in the midst of a tumultuously difficult time. One of those fierce epochs of late youth where you feel for the first time as if life might be passing you by. This poem was a way in, a way through and a way beyond. The new life just beginning, even if was just in the physically felt image of ‘small birds, s…

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Anger

is the deepest form of care, for another, for the world, for the self, for a life, for the body, for a family and for all our ideals, all vulnerable and all, possibly, about to be hurt.

Stripped of physical imprisonment and violent reaction, anger points toward the purest form of compassion; the internal living flame of anger always illuminates what we belong to, what we wish to protect and those things for which we are willing to hazard and even imperil ourselves.

What we usually call anger is only what is left of its essence when we are overwhelmed by its accompanying vulnerability, when it reaches the lost surface of our mind or our body’s incapacity to hold it, or when it touches the limits of our understanding.

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Unrequited

love is the love human beings experience most of the time. The very need to be fully requited may be to turn from the possibilities of love itself. Men and women have always had difficulty with the way a love returned hardly ever resembles a love given, but unrequited love may be the form that love mostly takes; for what affection is ever returned over time in the same measure or quality with which it is given? Every man or woman loves differently and uniquely, and each of us holds different dreams and hopes and falls in love or is the object of love at a very specific threshold in a very particular life where very, very particular qualities are needed for the next few years of our existence. What other human being could ever love us as we need to be loved? And whom could we know so well and so intimately through all the twists and turns of a given life that we could show them exactly the continuous and appropriate form of affection they need?

Requited love may happen, but it is a beautiful temporary, a seasonal blessing, the aligning of stars not too often in the same quarter of the heavens, an astonishing blessing. But it is a harvest coming only once every long cycle, and a burden to the mind and the imagination when we set that dynamic as the state to which we must always return in order to feel ourselves in a true, consistent, loving relationship.

Whether our affections are caught in romantic love, trying to see our neighbours as ourselves, or trying to love a great but distant God, our love rarely seems to be returned in the mode that it is given. That gift is returned in ways that, to begin with, we rarely recognise. Human beings live in disappointment and a self-appointed imprisonment when they refuse to love unless they are loved the selfsame way in return. It is the burden of marriage, the difficult invitation at the heart of parenting and the central difficulty in our relationship with any imagined, living future. The great discipline seems to be to give up wanting to control the manner in which we are requited, and to forgo the natural disappointment that flows from expecting an exact and measured reciprocation, from a partner, from a child, from our hopes for a loving God.

We seem to have been born into a world where love, except for brilliant, exceptional moments, seems to exist from one side only, ours, and that may be the difficulty and the revelation and the gift – to see love as the ultimate in giving and letting go – and through the doorway of that affection make the most difficult sacrifice of all, giving away the very thing we want to hold forever.

-from Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words

The limestone mountains known as the Burren in north Clare are a place of beauty and inspiration, but like every corner of Ireland they have hidden among their slopes and rocks, a red thread of tragedy running through their history. During Cromwell’s repression of the Irish in the seventeenth century, his henchman Ireton, pursued fug…

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