Creating Without the Cloths of Heaven

One of the more unconventional highlights of a recent work trip to Dublin was coming across ‘W.B. Yeats©️ Water’.

Yes, apparently that’s a thing.

Several of Yeats’s poems have made their way into my consciousness over the years.

The Second Coming is probably my favourite, and one that very much resonates with the times in which we live, especially the first verse:

“Turning and turning in the widening gyre   

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere   

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst   

Are full of passionate intensity.”

(Joan Didion penned an insightful, and horrifying, essay on the stark excesses of the counterculture in 1960s California, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, whose title borrowed a phrase from the poem.)

But there’s another one of Yeats’s poems that perhaps speaks more universally and more personally to the individual:

He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven

“Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,

Enwrought with golden and silver light,

The blue and the dim and the dark cloths

Of night and light and the half light,

I would spread the cloths under your feet:

But I, being poor, have only my dreams;

I have spread my dreams under your feet;

Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.”

In this regard, I think we’re all poor to a certain extent.

Who can draw upon anything comparable to the heavens’ embroidered cloths in their creativity?

And who can truly say that their creativity, in whatever context or capacity, isn’t necessary to create a meaningful, fulfilling life?

And so here we are, all paupers, challenged by our very existence as human beings to create lives of purpose, meaning and fulfilment through our contributions…

… treading on the dreams of others that are spread out beneath our feet along the way.

So as we do so – as we we walk our path – let’s tread carefully on the dreams of our fellow travellers that are laid out in front of us.