Loose Leaf Notes

The theme was The Art of Asking the Beautiful Question and the beautiful question was described by workshop leader/poet David Whyte as part of a conversational frontier that moves, matures and broadens our lives.  

“What ground do I have to actually put my feet on?  Will I not turn away from the difficult side of my existence in order to fully be here? What vow is being made on my behalf?  Am I attentive enough to hear what is being announced?” were some of the beautiful questions that Whyte posed at the day long workshop I recently attended in Harrisonburg with friends. 

Talking about his poem “Self Portrait” that he wrote after seeing a Denmark exhibit of Van Gogh’s self-portraits, he referred to the opening line (which was not what he was expecting): It doesn’t interest me if there is one god or many gods.   “It’s not my question,” he told us. “What is my real question?  I want to know if you belong or feel abandoned” (the second line in the poem). 

Hearing the background stories to Whyte’s poems and experiencing his penetrating delivery of them (He reads lines more than once.) caused me to internalize them in ways I hadn’t by reading them on the page.  Themes on death and grief were explored.  The poems and insights he shared about the deaths of his mother, a neighbor and his friend and fellow poet John O’Donahue brought a tear to my eye.  There was also plenty of humor and good laughs.

My own beautiful question was elusive.  I seem to answer my question before I can ask it and the answer I usually get is similar to Whyte’s response to a woman in the audience who was dealing with acute grief.  “There is no need to know the meaning … Let yourself be fully disorientated … Face the depth of grief …. We’re trying to choose one or the other rather than let things mature.”   He spoke about the “ancient human intuition” that our loved ones are still here as a witness to our lives.  And, although to know where they are is beyond our knowing, the conversation with them does reestablish itself and sometimes matures.

I decided that the art of asking the beautiful is a practice to be done in the moment, an announcement that I must be attentive to hear.   And here’s the best part of a beautiful question, as described by Whyte:  “A beautiful question shapes you as much by asking it as it does by actually answering.  Just by asking a beautiful question you are emancipated into a larger conversation, put in a hall of a larger house of presence.”

What is your beautiful question?