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Views and Reviews

What We All Want: Our Own House of Belonging

A Review of Poet David Whyte’s The House of Belonging

by Barbara Knott

Readers may wonder why I am reviewing a book that came out nearly 20 years ago. That was well before we started publishing The Grapevine in 2005 and before I began reading books by Bill Plotkin on Soulcraft and got acquainted with his Animas Valley Institute where he and his staff have been “Guiding the Descent to Soul Since 1980.” As I recall, it was through his work that I rediscovered David Whyte whom Plotkin quotes often enough that I found I couldn’t resist finding the full fruit of the poet’s labor and began to bring all his books (along with Plotkin’s) into my house.

In The House of Belonging, David Whyte has given us a sequence of vibrant images for recognizing and holding intact each and all of our belongings, from body to heart and soul and mind, as well as things we collect and places where we live and love and work ... our relations with family, friends and loved ones, both living and dead—all abiding together in the house of belonging where we are equally at home alone when we belong truly to ourselves. I feel so often nowadays how humans as a species are losing or have lost that sense of belongingness to the earth itself, the ultimate “house of belonging” for all of us, through its soil and trees, stones and rivers, and its astonishing variety of animal life, including humans. The world is crying out for attention to the human impulses gone awry into exploitation, careless plunder, trophy hunting, plastic producing, chemical poisoning, all ways of wasting our precious resources for regaining a sense of at-one-ment with our house of belonging.

Recalling himself to himself, Whyte begins, “At the center of this life/ there is a man I want to know again …” (p. 3). He goes on to describe the house (p. 6):

This is the bright home
in which I live,
this is where
I ask
my friends to come,
this is where I want
to love all the things
it has taken me so long
to learn to love.

This is the temple
of my adult aloneness
and I belong
to that aloneness
as I belong to my life.

No doubt, Whyte derives some of his sense of belongingness from his creative work in poetry, a vocation that calls for repose and reveries that take shape in imagination, the faculty that prompted even Einstein to declare in a 1929 interview, “Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world.” (See footnote.)

Gaston Bachelard says in The Poetics of Reverie (p. 64), “A dreamer’s reverie is sufficient to make an entire universe dream.” The poet looks from the allness of the universe to the eachness of us and our belongings and to the houses where belongings dwell with us in this life, this world.

Whyte’s poems help us see the bright cedar in the rafters of our own essential being, to feel our foundations, the grounding of ourselves in the dark soil of the earth, to rest comfortably in the night and the darkness of our lives, in the shadows as well as the light of our existence, even to pray to the “otherness of the night” (p. 5). One of the shadows he rests with is given expression in his poem “The Sun” (pp. 90-1), where he makes a statement picked up by Bill Plotkin and others as a remarkable self-discovery in our searching for what it means to be human:

Sometimes reading
Kavanaugh I look out
at everything
growing so wild
and faithfully beneath
the sky
and wonder
why we are the one
terrible
part of creation
privileged
to refuse our flowering.

Oh, but there are wonderful other renderings of reverie from one who did not refuse his flowering, not in poetry! He says ultimately (p. 51), I’ve learned …/ how to be alone,/ and at the edge of aloneness/ how to be found by the world.

And glad we are to be among those who have found him. This book has given me a profound perspective on my own life in this world, from its particular arrangement of particles to the vibrant longings that emanate from mind and heart and body toward erotic connections among people to each other and to the world. Strangely, it has taken me back to my first year in graduate school at East Carolina University when I joined a group of poets to write and publish some of our own work. Even then, in a poem called “In Our Dreams and Waking Visions,” I asked the question and answered myself:

What is it that we search for, then/ besides—or in anticipation of—/ the awakening of absolute love?/ I search for a community of lovers/ where laughter rings out/ like the delighted clap of dolphins/ sporting in the sun,/ where grief strikes deep into a communal heart/ like the anguish of a widowed seawife/ whose lover is by public mourned and sent to rest.

How richly the poems in Whyte's book give to readers the reveries we need for exploring our own houses of belonging. I find myself wanting to call not only my address but also my body, my family, my community of loving relationships, my work as a poet, and the salon I host here … all of them, my house of belonging.

If you haven’t yet read David Whyte’s work in poetry, please have a look at its riches. Or read it again.

Sources:

David Whyte, The House of Belonging, originally published in 1997 and now in its 10th printing (Langley, Washington: Many Rivers Press, 2016).

Bill Plotkin, Soulcraft, (Novato, California: New World Library, 2003).

Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Reverie (Boston, Massachusetts: Beacon Press, 1960).

Make a sidetrip when you’re in the mood to read this fascinating piece:

What Life Means to Einstein: An Interview by George Sylvester Viereck

Einstein Article