What Shape of you Wants to Emerge?
Inspirations from David Whyte’s poem, What to Remember When Waking
I feel like a broken record, even to myself. Emergence, emergence, what wants to come forth, step forward, flourish, begin to take up space? These themes circle around me and within me these days, not surprising given the season we are in here in the northern hemisphere. Also, maybe not surprising given the tenor of these times, and the need for imaginal and creative visions of life. And then there’s the personal element of feeling on the edge of expansion – a seed inside that is wanting to grow, still fuzzy yet as to what it will become. For all of these reasons, emergence is a thread running through the elements of my days, both internally and externally.
I used the David Whyte poem, What to Remember When Waking, in a workshop this weekend (copied below). I have heard this poem many times over the last stretch of years, and it finds me differently each time I hear it. At this moment in time, I am hearing it as a question of emergence, inviting us to leave space for the bigger thing to come through, the presence of creation before it is tangible, the oak in the acorn.
It’s a process that most of the time I would really like to rush; other times I am quite fine just staying a seed in the dark earth that doesn’t have to make its way anywhere.
To sit with the process of becoming isn’t easy or comfortable. It gnaws away at my patience. The journey of waiting through the fallow times can vacillate between a wild excitement and a hopeless numbing – when will the thing just happen? When will I know what is next? When will the flower finally bloom?
As Whyte’s poem suggests – the plans we can make ourselves are too small to live. I am finding for myself that the work of holding space for what is yet to emerge requires many containers. The container of my own body, moved and present, able to hold the changing sensations of emergence. It also requires the container of community, of others who are in the process of unfolding with awareness. And it requires connection to the bigger/larger/beyond. On a given day, that might be ancestral presence, the earth herself, or dipping into meditative/spiritual/depth practices and lineages. It is in the remembering to touch into one or more of these containers as often as I can, and to allow myself enough time to feel held by them, that I can tolerate and even begin to savor being with emergence itself.
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 writing desk?
—David Whyte
Reflective Prompts:
What is taking shape in you? What is calling you out beyond the limits you have on yourself? What are you living into in your own process of emergence? Who and what is helping you navigate the process?
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