 If you have ever wondered if you are the only person feeling stifled by the expectations of the prevailing corporate culture and lifestyle, you'll find insight and some comfort in The Heart Aroused by David Whyte, as you explore how poetry addresses the problem of being fully human in a commodity driven world.
The premise is that if a corporation can't meet all of the desires of its workers for a full and rewarding life, it simply requires workers to give up those personal desires. Not too surprisingly, a corporation will support and nurture only the desires that it can fulfill materially. This can lead to an unbalanced and unhealthy relationship between our authentic selves, which are multifaceted, unruly, wild, and sometimes dark and dangerous, and the orderly and focused expectations of the workplace. Since we spend more time at work in our waking hours than in other pursuits, we often experience this as a painful and poignant disassociation with what is most important to us in our lives.
The diagnosis is elegantly expounded by David Whyte who reminds us that our poets are experts at the wild and unruly patterns of the mind. While we may fret over spreadsheets and silicon, mapping our murky mental landscape is the poet's bread and butter. Writers have depicted in poetry the very struggles that still face human beings everyday, even if we now find those struggles in feverish encounters in meeting rooms, or in the pressing isolation of the cubical, rather than in the dragon fighting daring-do of medieval knights. To reattach us with ourselves, our creativity, and the power of the written word, David Whyte draws parallels from Beowolf, Dante's Devine Comedy, poems from William Blake, T.S. Eliot, Irish folktales and excerpts from his own poetry.
This is a book that is designed to be brooded over, like Grendel's corpse at the bottom of a psychic swamp, while you imagine that everyone else is drinking mead up at the castle. To help with that process there are excellent questions to ponder, organized by chapter, in a User's Guide in the back of the book.
Many of these are the kind of big questions that make a great place to start in forming a Life Balance™ list that reflects who you are and who you want to become. |
