Sticks, Stones, and Pricklies
REST is the conversation between what we love to do and how we love to be. … To rest is to give up on the already exhausted will as the prime motivator of endeavour, with its endless outward need to reward itself through established goals. To rest is to give up on worrying and fretting, and the sense that there is something wrong with the world unless we are there to put it right; to rest is to fall back, literally or figuratively, from outer targets and shift the goal not to an inner, static bull’s eye, an imagined state of perfect stillness, but to an inner state of natural exchange. (David Whyte – Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words)
This blog morning I find myself saturated like a dripping sponge. I don’t want to wring the excess out of myself, rather I want to be with all the new that has come with this week of high activity and interaction. I feel the need to pause for the kind of rest that allows integration of the abundance of new ideas, new information, new opportunities, new possibilities that have emerged and are emerging in my world.
And so today, I yield the open and lovely white page on my writing desk to nourishment from David Whyte’s words that guided me into deep sleep last evening.
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 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 writing desk?
Calm Flow on the Rio Grande - Del Norte, Colorado