Lea Page
Between the Path and the Way: A 1000 Mile Journal
- Time of past OR future Camino
- CF (2018)
VF (2022)
I first read the title of this poem as "walking," not waking. But then I realized that the two are very much the same. For me, anyway.
I walk the VF Sud in a week. I already walk daily, and I've had all my gear ready forEVER, so I've been spending more time preparing for the internal camino. This showed up for me today, and I thought, not for the first time, that the camino does indeed provide.
I am sharing here in case these words can inspire, awaken (awalken?) someone else.
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?
I walk the VF Sud in a week. I already walk daily, and I've had all my gear ready forEVER, so I've been spending more time preparing for the internal camino. This showed up for me today, and I thought, not for the first time, that the camino does indeed provide.
I am sharing here in case these words can inspire, awaken (awalken?) someone else.
What to Remember When Waking
by David WhyteIn 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?
