Beginning Yet Again...
Jun 03, 2023Photo: A while past sunrise the 'morning chair' of my Portland hOMe. Video: The Pacific Coast off Asilomar Retreat Center. Monterey, CA. On retreat with David Whyte.
What to Remember When Waking
In that first hardly noticed moment
in which you wake,
coming back to this life
from the other
more secret, moveable
and frighteningly honest world
where everything began,
there is a small opening into the new day
that closes the moment you begin your plans.
What you can plan
is too small for you to live.
What you can live wholeheartedly
will make plans enough
for the vitality hidden in your sleep.
To be human is to become visible
while carrying what is hidden
as a gift to others.
To remember the other world in this world
is to live in your true inheritance.
You are not a troubled guest on this earth,
you are not an accident
amidst other accidents
you were invited
from another and greater night
than the one from which
you have just emerged.
Now, looking through
the slanting light
of the morning window
toward the mountain presence
of everything that can be,
what urgency calls you
to your one love?
What shape waits
in the seed of you
to grow and spread its branches
against a future sky?
Is it waiting
in the fertile sea?
In the trees
beyond the house?
In the life you can imagine for yourself?
In the open
and lovely
white page
on the waiting desk?
...
‘What to Remember When Waking’
From RIVER FLOW: New and Selected Poems
Many Rivers Press. ©David Whyte
