WHAT TO REMEMBER WHEN WAKING

In that first hardly noticed moment
to 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
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 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?

~ David Whyte ~

(The House of Belonging)