A New Dawn: How do you start the day?

 

Angel David, FreeImages

 

I wake up in the morning and, for a brief moment, in a haze of sleep, I forget that the world is on standstill.

Then reality dawns.

Jewish tradition has a prayer of gratitude to recite upon opening one’s eyes each morning. Parents sing this short prayer with their young children.

Each day you are a new creation.

How you start your day sets the tone for the rest of it.

Now that we aren’t rushing off to work or school or the gym, we might pause to thank the Universe that we’re still here.

My morning poetry habit sustains me.

David Whyte’s, “What To Remember When Waking“ is one of my favorites and seems just right for today.

*. *. *

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 writing desk?

~