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 waiting desk?

-David Whyte

Finally some sun so I could sit on the beach! I read this poem, from Whyte's Crossing The Unknown Sea: Work as a Pilgrimage of Identity

Terrific read so far - Whyte's work (prose or poetry) speaks to me. I'm still struggling mightily with what seems to be presenting itself as a calling, emerging from the murky depths of my emotions and preconceptions of who I have "been" thus far. I'm not so sure if it's the new paths emerging that are so confusing, or ridding myself of the old paradigms that don't work for me anymore (they never really did!). I have noticed lately that books such as Parker Palmer's Let Your Life Speak, among others, have helped me to focus on work as a mission, a calling, a fulfillment of we are born to do. Work in this case does not always mean a paid "job" - rather, a role of caretaker, creator, nurturer, supporter, Friend... You "work" at the "work" - and if you are lucky, you find yourself in a place where you can emerge and grow into the life you are meant to lead.

Or so I see it for the moment. Those views change everyday, focus a bit more for me. I was often terrified by what Whyte calls the "open and lovely white page" on the desk of my life. No rules, no method, no lines, even! How to find my direction? The inner "work" I'm doing now, on this path of discernment that at times is quite painful, will hopefully lead me to writing on that blank page. And in fact, that page erases every day, open once again to new thoughts.

I was reminded today of Sisyphus, how he kept pushing that big rock up that hill every day, only to see it roll back down again. Frustrating. Today I don't see this as a heavy rock - more like an intriguing puzzle. A spiritual scavenger hunt, if you will - with lots of pieces hidden in the oddest of places. What piece will I find for myself today?