What to Remember When Waking

June 26, 2006 · by Christine

In that first hardly noticed moment in which you wake,
coming back to this life from the other,
more secret, movable and frighteningly honest world
where everything began,
there is a small opening into the new day
which 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 trouble 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?

-David Whyte

This is one of my favorite poems about the creative life.  “What you can plan is too small for you to live” is a line that reverberates in me often, reminding me of the ways my desire to plan my life can create less space for me to notice God’s surprises and the creative expressions waiting to emerge.  What plans are too small for your life?  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?

Posted in Poetry |