Old news and worn out ideas

What to remember when waking By 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 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?”

As David alludes to, we look outside our windows longingly, looking for our place in the world while not noticing that we are the ones weighing ourselves down.

We encumber ourselves subconsciously in old news, the weighty and worn-out ideas of what our lives could look like, if only we could somehow get to where we are going.

We walk invisibly cocooned with all the things we wish to control, thinking that by keeping these things close we will be able to manage them, that if we keep our worries in plain sight there is less chance of them coming true. When in fact the very act of doing so is causing us to live in the places we are trying to avoid. And the more we shrink away the more worry and burden we pick up along the way.

The heavier we become, the more we sink, like rocks to the bottom of our river. We then tumble and grind ourselves along the bed rather than allowing ourselves to be carried to the calm cool waters.

Instead of feeling fear of all that might come bounding forth from the unknown, feel intrigued! Be delighted even that something new is being born at every moment. What we are trying so hard to avoid or hold in place may in fact be our dreams desperately trying to come into form.

And the fear is a necessary part of the birthing process, but trust is paramount. Keep faith.

We can release the stress that fear has on us and still courageously work with our deepest intention. The more we trust the journey itself the more fluid and joyful life can become.

These places of tension are where you are holding a secret fear that you are not supported. That you have been forgotten. That life does not love you. That you are failing.

See how these fears do not serve you. Let them go.

Acknowledge that you are being weighed down and choose, even for just this moment right now, to surrender. Try it. Now. And then take a moment to sense, to notice, the peace trying to flood in and lovingly hold you.

Now imagine cutting the ties to these tense places and allow yourself to be carried to the mysterious and nourishing waters within.

You are being asked to surrender to the beauty trying to unfold. The beauty trying to bring you to that far off land of dreams you have been looking outside of yourself for.

Understand that it has been trying to take you there all along.

Now get out of your own way and allow it to….

 —
Andrew.