UNUTTERABLY OURSELVES

“All the birds

and creatures of the world are unutterably

themselves.”

- David Whyte

Back flat against the sand, a towel mimicking some form of table cloth as the sun ate away against my skin on that Saturday afternoon, a feast of warmth feasting on warmth.

I lay there listening to the relentless roar of the ocean. The shy squeaks of sand under the feet of passers-by. The fob of a tennis ball against a racquet as a man sent it flying for his dog to catch further up the beach.

I see out of the corner of my eye pressed against the texture of the towel beneath me the subtle rise and fall of my companion for the day — a zany young woman who reflects God’s goodness more than she’ll care to admit, who listens to His spirit without knowing it’s Him.

We catch one another’s glimpse and softly let out a muffled giggle into our towels. We talk of the hardiness of Banksia trees, the way a shell carries the sound of the sea away with it in the hands of its human collectors. We dip and dive gently between the waves and dry off under the relentless blessing of that Saturday sun.

As we regard the dogs play and the tree branches sway, the topic of peace in identity arises in conversation. My companion shares with me the themes of a recent podcast she listened to (“On Being: The Conversational Nature of Reality”), and brings to light a concept that I have been totally mindful of in recent times myself. In the podcast, David Whyte, poet and philosopher, speaks the following:

“One of the interesting qualities of being human is, by the look of it, we’re the only part of creation that can actually refuse to be ourselves. As far as I can see, there’s no other part of the world that can do that. The cloud is the cloud; the mountain is the mountain; the tree is the tree; the hawk is the hawk. The kingfisher doesn’t wake up one day and say, “You know, God, I’m absolutely fed up to the back teeth of this whole kingfisher trip. Can I have a day as a crow? You know, hang out with my mates, glide down for a bit of carrion now and again? That’s the life for — ” No, the kingfisher is just the kingfisher.

And one of the healing things about the natural world to human beings is that it’s just itself. But we, as human beings, are really quite extraordinary in that we can actually refuse to be ourselves. We can get afraid of the way we are. We can temporarily put a mask over our face and pretend to be somebody else or something else. And the interesting thing is then we can take it another step of virtuosity and forget that we were pretending to be someone else and become the person we were on the surface at least, who we were just pretending to be in the first place.”

Now… read that again. And really think it over.

Here is the question I ask myself and my comrade horizontal on the sand: Why are we different? How did we come to be this way?

I wrestle to come up with some form of evolutionary explanation — some materialistic answer that excludes the battle of will, of good and evil, in and around us.

I begin to explain to my companion the recent journey I have been on to take the identity of “Child of God” as given to me by God Himself according to the Bible, and run with it to the ends of the earth, to the ends of my being. I said how “unutterably myself” I would become were I to fully subscribe in spirit and in practice to this identity of infinitely loved and how this would lead me to becoming the version of myself I was unmistakably called and created to be.

In what way are you, whether you are a believer of God or not, being “yourself” ? What does that look like? A sense of peace and calm and assurance and joy surely will flow from this, like it does for “All the birds, all the creatures of the world…”