The Antidote for Exhaustion

according to a priest and a bottle of wine

Anyone else feel exhausted?

I was reminded of this story that I heard from the Irish poet David Whyte.

He recounted a time when he felt completely exhausted… in his work, in his soul, in his life. On a specifically broken down day, his long time friend a priest named David was coming over to his house to share a bottle of wine and to read poetry together.

He tells the story as so…..

“Brother David?”

I uttered it in such an old, petitionary, Catholic way that I almost thought he was going to say,”Yes, my son?” But he did not; he turned his face toward me, following the spontaneous note of desperate sincerity, and simply waited.

“Tell me about exhaustion,” I said.

He looked at me with an acute, searching, compassionate ferocity for the briefest of moments, as if trying to sum up the entirety of the situation and without missing a beat, as if he had been waiting all along, to say a life-changing thing to me. He said, in the form both of a question and an assertion:

“You know that the antidote to exhaustion is not necessarily rest?”

“The antidote to exhaustion is not necessarily rest,” I repeated woodenly, as if I might exhaust myself completely before I reached the end of the sentence.

“What is it, then?”

“The antidote to exhaustion is wholeheartedness.”

….

The rest of the advice is brilliant… and it’s a quick read to.

But what brother David leads future full time poet David to is often we feel exhausted when we are trying to stay in the place where we know how to be and yet we are being constantly drawn, if not pushed by the Universe, into the new place.

“You have ripened already, and you are waiting to be brought in. Your exhaustion is a form of inner fermentation. You are beginning, ever so slowly, to rot on the vine.”

…

Um…. I don’t have an answer for you today about your exhaustion. Only you can answer what is calling you towards wholeheartedness.

I am rotting on the vine of:

My old faith practices

My old paradigms

My old faith in institutions

My old body shape

My old life plans

My old narrative of what life is and how it all is going to turn out.

My old dreams of being an artist

My old ideas of who I’d be by today

But my hope in exhaustion…..

(One more time for the skimmers)

But my hope in exhaustion is that it is the necessary preamble to stepping into a fuller sense of my life and the gift that I can offer this world.

I believe that for you too.

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