By David Whyte
Courage is a word that tempts us to think outwardly, to run bravely against opposing fire, to do something under besieging circumstance, but to look at its origins is to look in a more interior direction and towards its original template, the old Norman French Coeur, or Heart.
Courage is a measure of our heartfelt participation with life, with another, with the community, a work, a future. To be courageous is not necessarily to go anywhere or to do anything except to make conscious those things we already feel deeply and then to live through the unending vulnerabilities of those consequences.
To be courageous is to seat our feelings deeply in the body and in the world, to live up to and into the necessities of relationships that often already exist with things we find we already care deeply about, with a person, a future, a possibility in society, or with an unknown that begs us on and always has begged us on. To be courageous is to stay close to the way we are made.
We become courageous whenever we live closely to the point of tears with any new possibility made known inside us whenever we demonstrate a faith in the interior annunciations and align ourselves with the new and surprising and heartfelt necessities of even the average existence. To allow ourselves to feel deeply and thoroughly what has already come into being, is to change our future simply by living up to the consequence of knowing what we hold in our affections.
From the inside it can feel like confusion, only slowly do we learn what we really care about and allow our outer life to be realigned in that gravitational pull.
Courage is what love looks like when tested by the simple everyday necessities of being alive.