Join David Whyte for what is becoming an annual ‘START CLOSE IN’ Three Sundays in January, a thoughtful and arresting entrance into the new year, with a foundational emphasis on the act of simplifying.

Starting close in means shaping a life where we can experience freedom, happiness and even joy in the midst of the difficulties that have accompanied human life in every epoch of human history.

Simplicity does not mean we refuse to engage in complex endeavours, nor turn away from the overwhelming nature of our present challenges. It does not mean naivety, or putting our heads in the sand. But there is a necessity for powerful, simple disciplines of the everyday, disciplines that begin with our breathing and our bodies, moving out through  simple movements - our speech, our homes and all the varied forms of our work that can help us meet the world on better terms than responses that spring from anxiety.

All of us can feel the tide beginning to turn and the road beginning to open again, however slowly, regarding our possible release from the confinements of the last two years. And we find ourselves still in the midst of the deep difficulties these trying two years have brought.

In the midst of overwhelming circumstances, no different from our own tumultuous times, human beings have always been called to a form of radical simplification, to returning to a true foundation from which they can step into a new life: to the making of new promises and the letting go of old ones.

Our New Year’s resolutions are but magnified versions of this ancient taking on and giving up. The understanding has always been that we have to give away something precious; something we previously thought was fundamental.

There is a reason Marie Kondo is so popular in almost every prospoerous corner of the world right now; we need to sweep and clear every corner of our minds as much as our overburdened homes and then we need to clean our wider world in the same way, all the while living in a time when we are constantly besieged by personal and planetary anxieties and difficulties.

In this giving away we come to ground in our possibilities again, possibilities that were previously hidden by our too complicated view of what needed to be done, and who we needed to be in order to do it. We have a sense that we need to be preparing to get out on the road again, though we know that road must be taken in ways we never understood before. These three sessions are a way of simplifying and then repacking and preparing for that journey from the inside out, ready for the perils and possibilities this new year might bring. 

Join David Whyte for Three Sundays in January to look at the phenomenon of giving up and giving in, in order to go on; of finding new promises by letting go of old ones, and remembering those vows that seemed to have been made on our behalf at our birth.
 

If you cannot afford the registration price due to present hardship, please contact [email protected] with a line of explanation for our heavily discounted rate.