Transitions

Summer is slipping away. We feel it in our bones. The way we can perceive a small change in the angle of sunlight, feel a slight coolness in the air and a subtle scent that signals fall is coming. It’s harvest time and plant life begins to recoil and leaves begin to change color and transition into something entirely new before they dry up and fall to the ground.

The transition from summer to fall possess so much potency, mystery, beauty or predictability. The transition can feel bitter sweet. The reluctance to leave the one thing we’ve come to know and the uncertainty, excitement or dread to what lies ahead. These transitions are a gateway for what’s coming. How do we prepare, attune and orient ourselves toward the coming change? Does it even matter?

What value do you place on the quality of experience you’d like to have as time and the changing seasons arise and slip by? How might you slow down, even a little bit, to let your senses and imagination guide you?

 

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What to Remember Upon Waking

by David Whyte

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