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 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 lights 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?

~ David Whyte