Walking Within Wisdom #45

What to Remember When Waking

October 15, 2019

If you were wondering, I am continuing to walk EVERYDAY listening to or speaking with wisdom keepers as I walk. My dearest Ayruvedic Doctor Laksman Das asked me a question a couple of weeks ago which lead me to get curious about why I felt like I needed to post everyday. This inquiry gave me permission to reimagine how I am creating and curating this Walking Within Wisdom Library, and not posting everyday :-)… If you are interested in what I am listening to or learning and I haven’t posted in a bit, just send me a note ❤

The wisdom I am called to share today is a poem by David Whyte that I heard through Jody England’s Wild Soul Medicine podcast (which I have been “binging” for about 2 weeks now) called “What to Remember When Waking” Although I have read quite a bit of David Whyte’s work, I had never read this particular poem (thank you Jody!) and I was drawn to share it. With all of that, I will leave this here…

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
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 writing desk?

– David Whyte