Pienza Woman

I keep coming back to this image.  I took it in Pienza in 2017 during a photo workshop.  I’m not sure what drew me to it then nor what keeps calling me back, but I identify with it in some deep way.  I heard David Whyte read this poem the other day on a podcast, and I think the first few lines of it are part of my answer.

​Stone (Thobar Phádraig)
David Whyte

The face in the stone is a mirror looking into you.
You have gazed into the moving waters,
you have seen the slow light, in the sky
above Lough Inagh, beneath you, streams have flowed,
and rivers of earth have moved beneath your feet,
but you have never looked into the immovability
of stone like this, the way it holds you, gives you
not a way forward but a doorway in, staunches
your need to leave, becomes faithful by going nowhere,
something that wants you to stay here and look back,
be weathered by what comes to you, like the way you too
have travelled from so far away to be here, once reluctant
and now as solid and as here and as willing
to be touched as everything you have found.


I felt like the woman was gazing at me as I was gazing at her, and yet she was looking into the distance.  There was a longing with which I could identify.

I keep coming back to this image.

Hear David Whyte reading the poem here.  
onbeing.org/poetry/stone-thobar-phadraig/
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