I’ve been seeing more people standing on street corners with signs in my small town. A couple of weeks back, a middle-aged woman on the median of a busy intersection held a one word sign – “Help.” It’s unusual to see a woman on the street holding a sign; mostly it’s men.
Most signs ask for a ride to Key West, for work or money.
This sign held last Friday by a man in his 50’s dressed in jeans and a sorta-clean white t-shirt gnawed at me thoughout the weekend:
Lost all pride. I am just one step away from homeless. Painted for 38 years. God bless America and pray for me.
All of us are one step away from something or other – leaving a job, quitting a relationship, commitment, portion control or making a change toward living the life we want for ourselves.
Sometimes that next step may be out of our control; but, most of the time there’s a step we can take but are avoiding.
In his poem, Start Close In, David Whyte is all knowing about that first step.
Start close in,
don’t’ take the second step
or the third,
start with the first
thing
close in,
the step
you don’t want to take.
Subsequent stanzas prompt us to “start with the ground you know, the pale ground beneath your feet,” and to stay true to ourselves. “Start with your own question, give up on other people’s questions,” begins one verse.
I ask myself: “What am I one step away from? What is the step I don’t want to take?”
And you, dear reader, you are one step away from what?
Poet David Whyte grew up with a strong, imaginative influence from his Irish mother among the hills and valleys of his father’s Yorkshire. He now makes his home, with his family, in the Pacific Northwest of the United States.
The author of six books of poetry and three books of prose, David Whyte holds a degree in Marine Zoology and has traveled extensively, including living and working as a naturalist guide in the Galapagos Islands and leading anthropological and natural history expeditions in the Andes the Amazon and the Himalaya. He brings this wealth of experience to his poetry, lectures and workshops.
His life as a poet has created a readership and listenership in three normally mutually exclusive areas: the literate world of readings that most poets inhabit, the psychological and theological worlds of philosophical enquiry and the world of vocation, work and organizational leadership.
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