How It Works

1. Read the poem 

2. Do your own reflection on it, noting what it inspires in you

3. Feel free to use your own reflection as your prompt or…

4. Use the selection of prompts below

5. Pick one that inspires you and write (feel free to use only one or write several poems using different prompts) or…

6. Don’t use any of the provided prompts and follow your inspiration from wherever it comes

Everything Is Waiting For You

(After Derek Mahon)

Your great mistake is to act the drama
as if you were alone. As if life
were a progressive and cunning crime
with no witness to the tiny hidden
transgressions. To feel abandoned is to deny
the intimacy of your surroundings. Surely,
even you, at times, have felt the grand array;
the swelling presence, and the chorus, crowding
out your solo voice. You must note
the way the soap dish enables you,
or the window latch grants you freedom.
Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity.
The stairs are your mentor of things
to come, the doors have always been there
to frighten you and invite you,
and the tiny speaker in the phone
is your dream ladder to divinity.

Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into
the conversation. The kettle is singing,
even as it pours you a drink, the cooking pots
have left their arrogant aloofness and
seen the good and you at last. All the birds
and creatures of the world are unutterably
themselves. Everything is waiting for you.

—David Whyte
https://davidwhyte.com

If you wish to attend the read around (t’s free, fun, a great way to share, and reading a poem is optional). Note: If you registered already, you do not need to register again, simply use the link sent to you in your confirmation email. Register Here:

The next Read-Around is 6/4/25 at 5:00 PM PDT

My Thoughts

Now we have our devices. Unimaginable reams of media at our fingertips, ready access to vast knowledge, and a buzzing social network of talking heads. We can hear distant voices and stream people we’ve never met into our lives. How easily we get addicted to our devices like junkies on brain “stims,” spiking for adrenaline. With these weapons of mass distraction in our hands, who can be bothered by waiting? Waiting is our kingdom come, squeezing in another download, hopscotching from outrage over headlines to giggling over cat antics, to streaming the breeze. Anything to escape the gaping jaws of aloneness and boredom, of interminable moments with nothing to do but wait — without a handheld. Waiting is a lost art, a loss that means we never learn what the poet David Whyte, in his poem, Everything Is Waiting For You, refers to as the discipline of alertness in the face of the familiar. To sit in a space and sense the intimacy of one’s surroundings; to see the swelling presence of things that have mastered the art of waiting, and then to feel how everything is, in some strange way, waiting for us to arrive, to offer ourselves, like a door to the intimacy of everyday things in which the world comes alive in us, to us, and for us. What in your world is waiting for you? And what does your world have to tell you?

Prompt Ideas

1. Journal or write about a time when you acted the drama as if you were alone.

2. What might Whyte’s comment, if life were a progressive and cunning crime with no witness to the tiny hidden transgressions, mean?

3. Journal or write a poem about a time when you felt the intimacy of your surroundings. Describe what happens when you feel the intimacy versus when you deny the intimacy of your surroundings.

4. Take a look around your home and note the way things in your surroundings “speak to you.” Consider individual items in your surroundings and the specific message they might give to you.

5. Journal or write a poem about the “alertness as the hidden discipline of familiar.

6. Write about instances when doors have frightened you and when they have invited you.

7. How can you “ease into a conversation with your surroundings?”

8. As usual, write about whatever else inspires you form the poem or from life.