Please join in for the May 2020 Writing From The Inside Out read-around sessions on Friday afternoons (t’s free, fun, a great way to share, and reading a poem is optional). If you have not registered, click the button below; and if you have registered, you do not need to register again, simply use the link sent to you in your confirmation email.

Register Here:

  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 the poem

  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

NOTE: Class on Friday, May 15, 2020 will start at 4:45 PM,
instead of 4:00 PM as usual; all other classes start at 4 PM

My Thoughts

In 2012, I taught a class in Scarborough, Australia (near Perth) and had the good fortune to walk the beach every morning looking out over an endless horizon where the blue of the sky met the blue of the sea. This inspired me to write a poem, titled Endless Horizon, which I shared with the class. A student came up to me afterwards and said the my poetry reminder her of the poetry of David Whyte, with whom I was unfamiliar. Afterwards, I looked up his work and realized she had paid me an extremely high compliment. I have since been an avid David Whyte fan and have even gone on two of his walking tours, one through Florence, Italy and one through County Claire, Ireland.

I love any poem that encourages us to widen our embrace of the world or that bolsters our courage to face the darkness in us and around us. Sweet Darkness is one of my favorites from David’s work. I believe that anyone who truly opens to poetry will eventually feel the world wash through; that you will then find yourself literally reduced to tears at some point by some simple unassuming thing in life because your eyes have been opened to the wild preciousness of being alive. Those moments come and go for me, when I least expect it, and each time the aliveness lingers like a promise of what is possible. Included below is my poem, Endless Horizon as an example of a reply to prompt 4 below, and as a celebration of those incredible moments when it really does seem that anything is possible.

Sweet Darkness
by David Whyte

When your eyes are tired
the world is tired also.

When your vision has gone
no part of the world can find you.

Time to go into the dark
where the night as eyes
to recognize its own.

There you can be sure
you are not beyond love.

The dark will be your womb
tonight.

The night will give you a horizon
further than you can see.

You must learn one thing.
The world was made to be free in.

Give up all the other worlds
except the one to which you belong.

Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet
confinement of your aloneness
to learn

anything or anyone
that does not bring you alive

is too small for you.

—From The House of Belonging

Week 6 Prompt Menu

  1. What happens when your eyes are tired, or you feel the weariness of the world? David Whyte considered it a time to go into the dark and find the gift there. Where does your tiredness tell you to go and what gift is there for you?

  2. The night has eyes to recognize its own-imagine peering through night eyes with that capacity and write what you see or what you recognize about the world or yourself from that perspective.  

  3. Many of us feel unworthy or unlovable, at least some of the time if not most of the time.  Write from the place in you that knows you are not beyond love. Give that place a voice to speak what it wants you to hear or know.

  4. Describe a time or what it might be like to have a horizon further than you can see.

  5. What “worlds” do you move in to which you actually do not belong? Contrast that with the “world” to which you belong? You can use the prompt, “One day I woke up in the world to which I belong and….”

  6. Write about someone or something that does not bring you alive. What is it that keeps you attached? What needs to change in order for you to expand.

  7. Write a poem of release for something or someone that is too small for you. Or, conversely, write a poem of celebration for something that brings you alive.

  8. Write about whatever inspires you from the poem or elsewhere in life.

Endless Horizon

You will hear the tireless
crash and roar
of wave after wave
battering at your beach,
crumbling belief into sand,
dropping the shells
of what no longer
lives in you
on the shore
and asking you
over and over:

Is the horizon
you envision
for yourself
big enough
to hold your dreams?

And your heart knows the answer.

Your heart knows when
the life you live
won’t let you
live your life.

Your heart knows when
the tides of change
come from the deep, deep sea,
from the unknown depths in you
that support an endless horizon

and then, on one clear day
you will stand on the shore
and see, for yourself,

all things possible.

On a clear day,
the ocean offers
an endless horizon,
an edge to the world
beyond which
you cannot see
and has no
perceivable destination.

A mystery to ancient mariners
who sailed the unknown sea
in search of undiscovered lands
or seeking mythic treasures
because the ocean edge
is wide enough
for all you might imagine.

It speaks to that part of you
that longs to know
what’s around the corner,
what’s over the hill,
what’s beyond the edge;
that part of you that knows
there is more to life
than what you have
allowed yourself to live.


If you squint and
stretch your eyes
to the farthest margin,
as if to peer over the edge
of your own horizon,
you will begin to wonder
what lies beyond
the rim of possibility
you have set for yourself.

© Nick LeForce, All Rights Reserved
Previously published in:
Endless Horizon