The standing stones are silent, the ground will not speak,
the half-moon flares in a dark sky, locking them in shadow.
How many times, blindfold by time, staring out
through starlight, or before the dawn at the dreamless
face of the sky about to wake, have we wanted to enter
that far night and leave our shoreline forever?

Tired of land, we open ourselves to oceans, tired of time
we give back all that we’ve taken, tired of ourselves
we open ourselves to ourselves at last, sensing the waves
and great abyss of the sea beyond, the ocean stretching
on sand and the long view on the still sea that leads
to another life.

And we go out as the fish go out, leaving the taste
of the rivers we know, joining the dark invisible weight
of what we would become, the calm sense of movement
Seeing the others forming our shoals, and the scales
on our sides filling the depths with trembling stars.

In that depth, return’s instinctual, the moon harvests
The long years and binds them in stones in a circle,
And we return too, for home from the sea we come
to the river, turning the ocean’s face toward land,
opening to silence, as the salmon opens to the sweet
water in a saltless stream.

Out of memory we come to our senses again, walking
the soft grass, this sea of blades stirred slightly
by a shifting breeze, this half known need to know
what others hardly knew themselves, this silence
in the stars, leading to the dawn’s first edge of sky
and a silence in ourselves that looks for resolution.

~David Whyte

When you open yourself to the continually changing, impermanent, dynamic nature of your own being and of reality, you increase your capacity to love and care about other people and your capacity to not be afraid. You’re able to keep your eyes open, your heart open, and your mind open. And you notice when you get caught up in prejudice, bias, and aggression. You develop an enthusiasm for no longer watering those negative seeds, from now until the day you die. And you begin to think of your life as offering endless opportunities to start to do things differently, endless opportunities to dissolve the seeds of war where they originate—in the hearts and minds of individuals like you and me.

~Pema Chödrön