Words Commensurate With Wonder

 A place sung for centuries

as the common source

from which we might drink

words fully commensurate with

the awe we need

to comprehend our world

Castalian Spring by David Whyte (one verse)

And so the mystic and poet David Whyte writes of the Castalian Spring at the foot of Mt. Parnassus, a spring which carries mythical promises of Apollo and Dionysius and other Greek stories of beauty and power and prophecy. For the poet upon his encounter with a seemingly simple spring near Delphi it was a release of bound classic expectations and an opening to the possibility of finding a quenching for the thirst for spiritual truth.

I am struck by the phrase “words fully commensurate with/the awe we need to comprehend our world”. 

Not only do I appreciate the tension between awe and comprehension, not to mention the absurdity of it, but I also am drawn to the notion of a source, fresh living water no less, which quenches in the form of understanding. Do we not all thirst for such nurturance?

The poet goes on: as I leant toward the spring

of shared memory that lives in me,

tasting the essence and the freshness

of every gifted-God given thing.

Sometimes, if we are very present and very open to infinitesimal messages, we stumble on wonder! We ask for it but do not know when or how it comes. And I am filled today with the possibility that such moments cleanse and nourish, kindling a hope which is the next step toward comprehension, a hope “commensurate” with the wonder, a hope which “springs” from a source of truth. Taste and See…