Quiet and Stillness Needed

As December begins, I feel the rush toward the end of the year pick up. It is an inner frenzy–all those things I had hoped to complete this year, my need for plans in hand, the lurking pressure of the holidays.

This sense of pressure makes me appreciate those mornings when I don’t need to worry about an alarm, when it is enough to let the sun break through the blinds, allowing the increasing brightness to shake me into the world.

Today, while browsing and reading online, I came across a poem by David Whyte titled “What to Remember When Waking.” It concludes with these lines:

“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?”

So here is my hope, that we all find the quiet and still mornings that allow us to look outward and inward, both and find what is calling us into the world this day.

Jill Gerard