“What you can plan is too small for you to live”

Dear Friends,

Last week, I talked about my List-Less Alligator.  Then a poem came to my attention that has the lines (apropos of my trying to live without to-do lists or strict 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.”  I love these little messages that remind us of the possibility of deep meaning.  Here’s the whole poem, by David Whyte:

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 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?

In the open and lovely white page on the waiting desk?

 

Dear friends, may you have a lovely week ahead.

With love,

Cat

1 thought on ““What you can plan is too small for you to live”

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s