For today’s new moon, someone I follow posted a David Whyte poem, What to Remember When Waking, by David Whyte. Some of the lines of the poem touched a deep place in me today. I thought they might touch you as well.

The poem is, in part, about that transitional, liminal state between sleeping and waking. I find that shift, each day, quite extraordinary. For a brief time, the other world might seem ordinary, because, in sleeping, we let ourselves attune to it. An hour later, images in our sleeping life often seem anything but ordinary. Like this morning, in my dream, I jumped many feet down to the ground, not using the stairs. And landed just fine.

Whyte writes, “In that first moment … there is a small opening … which closes the moment you begin your plans.”

Ah, so true. Whyte offers,

“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.“

A visionary healer of soul, he writes,

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 were invited from another and greater night.

One can only wonder about that. Or you may have your ideas. Finally, he offers inspiration:

“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?”

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This is not the entire poem. What part touches you? Did any of it give you a boost, on this new moon day, full of promise? Share in the comments if you’d like.