what to remember when waking

 

What to remember when waking

David Whyte

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 your true inheritence.

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?

after the workshop

no way back now

no way back to the

safe caverns of cynicism and

self-protection

burn that path

but see the shape of the

blackened twigs as they

snake back across the land

that shape

is my first mark

I pick up a piece of

burnt wood

and start to dance, and

draw, and sing 

my way 

across the universe

*

And a poem by David Whyte       http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s5i8Gv4lgEg 

stale as an old boot?

I've just had four days away in in Cornwall, which was breathtakingly beautiful. Cliff tops and wind, sun and brooding skies. I don't know about this block thing, but the minute I arrived I was off down to the edge of the cliffs carrying a bag so full of paints I could hardly move. I just sat in the sun, not having a clue what to do (having never painted landscape, or worked outside, except for one brief period in India), and started something. I was a bit literalistic at first, but after only a couple of attempts, I started to see something move.  I only did one or two small things a day, but it was irresistable, natural. The painting here was the last one I did, on day three. It was so windy that the paint was blowing across the page and I had to stop.

Mmmm. Blocks. I feel now that I was just stale, stuck somehow, in a perceptual, non-responsive rut. But what does that mean? At the time, looking for an explanation, you try to push (back to intention again), try to make things happen. You borrow stories from around you, telling yourself that you are 'just making excuses', or 'procrastinating', or that you're overwhelmed with fear. You panic that it's never going to happen again. But I'm starting to think that all this is rubbish, that nothing happens that shouldn't be happening as it is; that it's all part of a process that knows perfectly well what it needs, which is unfolding in its own time.

The last time I went away I came back thinking that I 'needed more stimulation'. As I'd been in London looking at paintings, I thought that I should be doing that up here. But I found that I hated visiting the city and going to galleries up here. It didn't work in the same way. This time, though, I've been away to the source of my work - the land, the sea, the sky - instead of looking other people's products, other people's responses. It's quite different.

7.30 am. Howling wind.