What to Remember...
David Whyte is an internationally acclaimed poet known for his words about words. For Whyte, poetry is life. Poetry is the words written by life itself if it would hold a pen. And it does in the hands of David Whyte.
I don’t know how I came about Whyte’s work, but I have been hooked ever since. I’ve read his poems, watched and listened to his lectures, and always came away re-energized about life and poetry.
For Christmas of last year, I asked for one of his books, Essentials. A wonderful book filled with Whyte’s best poetry and some prose. I often pick up this book to read and re-read the words. What I like the most is the author’s commentary on his poems. They are insightful and add to the poetry giving context and purpose, but not too much that the mystery is lost.
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,
movable
and frighteningly
honest
world
where everything
began,
there is a small
opening
into the day
that 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 become 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?
Above is my favorite poem in Essentials. It is a call to awaken to your true self - beyond what you could plan. To awaken into what you can imagine. The line, “What you can plan is too small for you to live.” Is a planned life desirable? Does not one shrink back from fatalism? Then why do we plan out our days and leave no room for mystery or the unknown?
David Whyte is giving us permission to live our days unplanned, yet full of imagination. “What shape waits in the seed of you… In the life you can imagine for yourself?”
You’re worthy of this purposeful life that you are gifted. “You are not a troubled guest on this earth, you are no accident…” You and I, the earth and sea, all that you can see, are created for each to live in and delight together.
The open page is our invitation, not to plan our day, or to control the world, but a means to write your story within the world you inhabit.
Have you heard of David Whyte before? What have you read of his?
