Monday, January 25, 2010

What to Remember When Waking
by David Whyte © 1999 Many Rivers Press

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.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

I love this poem, Alison. Thanks so much for sharing it.

Angela

Anonymous said...

thank you for posting this. i have just lost a dear friend to cancer and my mother-in-law is in hospice. so, this poem spoke to me in a very special way today, and i appreciated reading it in the midst of my sorrow.

much love...

Alison said...

You are welcome. I love it, too. I have to admit I cut the last stanzas. I think the poem should end right here. Apologies to david Whyte!

Unknown said...

Beautiful, moving, important. Thank you for sharing it.
I loved your poems in the last "Sun": equally beautiful, moving and important. Thank you for those.
AnnaBelle