Sourceless Light
PRACTICE FIVE
Your True Inheritance
Returning to yourself. Again, and again and again.
Returning to yourself. Again, and again and again.
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.
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.
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?
— David Whyte, What to Remember When Waking
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.
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.
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?
— David Whyte, What to Remember When Waking
Come, come, whoever you are.
Wanderer, worshipper, lover of leaving --
it doesn’t matter.
Ours is not a caravan of despair.
Come, even if you have broken your vow a thousand times.
Come, yet again, come, come.
— Rumi
Wanderer, worshipper, lover of leaving --
it doesn’t matter.
Ours is not a caravan of despair.
Come, even if you have broken your vow a thousand times.
Come, yet again, come, come.
— Rumi
In that room, with the clock on the wall and the silence that followed his words, I chose to belong — to belong to myself, and to my own life.
I wish I could tell you that once you make that choice, it holds forever. That you cross a threshold and the door closes behind you and you never have to find your way back again.
But that is not how it works. And I think, if you are honest with yourself, you already know this.
Belonging to yourself is not a destination. It is a practice of returning. The world will ask you, again and again — in ways large and small, obvious and almost invisible — to give yourself away. To manage yourself. To perform. To shrink into what is expected and call it maturity, or practicality, or love. And again and again, you will drift.
This is not failure. This is the human condition. This is, in fact, exactly what Eros calls us back from — not once, but for as long as we are alive.
Rumi understood this with a tenderness that moves me still, every time I read this poem. Come, even if you have broken your vow a thousand times. Come yet again. He is not speaking to the woman who has it together. He is speaking to the woman who has lost her way — again — and is standing at the edge of herself wondering if she is allowed to return.
You are always allowed to return.
And Whyte’s question — what urgency calls you to your one love, what shape waits in the seed of you — is not a question asked once. It is a question that deepens every time you bring yourself to it. The answer at forty is not the answer at fifty. The answer in grief is not the answer in joy. The seed keeps growing. The shape keeps becoming.
Before you write, do something physical. Stand up. Feel your feet on the earth. Place both hands on your heart and take three long breaths — the kind that reach all the way down into the belly.
First breath: let your head quieten a little — its plans and judgements softening at the edges.
Second breath: let your heart widen — as if there were a little more room inside your chest for what you truly love.
Third breath: let your gut settle — a low, steady sense that you are here, that the ground is holding, that you can tell yourself the truth.
Let your body remember that it is alive. That you are here. That you were, as Whyte says, invited.
Then sit. And write your answer to his question — in your own voice, your own register, as fierce or as tender or as raw as this moment asks:
What urgency calls me to my one love? What shape waits in the seed of me?
Let your heart speak first. Let it answer in images, fragments, longings, aches. You are not writing a CV. You are letting the part of you that knows what it loves name itself on the page.
When your heart has spoken, you can invite the other centres to add their lines:
From your head: ‘I know now that…’ — what you know, in clear language, about who you are and are not.
From your gut: ‘I will no longer…’ or ‘I am willing to…’ — the one or two commitments that make your body feel more solid, not more tense.
If you need a place to begin, you might write:
I wish I could tell you that once you make that choice, it holds forever. That you cross a threshold and the door closes behind you and you never have to find your way back again.
But that is not how it works. And I think, if you are honest with yourself, you already know this.
Belonging to yourself is not a destination. It is a practice of returning. The world will ask you, again and again — in ways large and small, obvious and almost invisible — to give yourself away. To manage yourself. To perform. To shrink into what is expected and call it maturity, or practicality, or love. And again and again, you will drift.
This is not failure. This is the human condition. This is, in fact, exactly what Eros calls us back from — not once, but for as long as we are alive.
Rumi understood this with a tenderness that moves me still, every time I read this poem. Come, even if you have broken your vow a thousand times. Come yet again. He is not speaking to the woman who has it together. He is speaking to the woman who has lost her way — again — and is standing at the edge of herself wondering if she is allowed to return.
You are always allowed to return.
And Whyte’s question — what urgency calls you to your one love, what shape waits in the seed of you — is not a question asked once. It is a question that deepens every time you bring yourself to it. The answer at forty is not the answer at fifty. The answer in grief is not the answer in joy. The seed keeps growing. The shape keeps becoming.
Before you write, do something physical. Stand up. Feel your feet on the earth. Place both hands on your heart and take three long breaths — the kind that reach all the way down into the belly.
First breath: let your head quieten a little — its plans and judgements softening at the edges.
Second breath: let your heart widen — as if there were a little more room inside your chest for what you truly love.
Third breath: let your gut settle — a low, steady sense that you are here, that the ground is holding, that you can tell yourself the truth.
Let your body remember that it is alive. That you are here. That you were, as Whyte says, invited.
Then sit. And write your answer to his question — in your own voice, your own register, as fierce or as tender or as raw as this moment asks:
What urgency calls me to my one love? What shape waits in the seed of me?
Let your heart speak first. Let it answer in images, fragments, longings, aches. You are not writing a CV. You are letting the part of you that knows what it loves name itself on the page.
When your heart has spoken, you can invite the other centres to add their lines:
From your head: ‘I know now that…’ — what you know, in clear language, about who you are and are not.
From your gut: ‘I will no longer…’ or ‘I am willing to…’ — the one or two commitments that make your body feel more solid, not more tense.
If you need a place to begin, you might write:
I belong to my own knowing. I belong to my own aliveness. I was not an accident. I was invited. And I will not die an unlived life.
Then continue in your own words. Write until something in your chest recognises itself on the page — that small internal yes that feels like the tiniest version of the bell.
When you have finished, read it aloud. Once. To yourself as the first and most important witness.
Keep what you have written. Return to it. Let it change as you change, deepen as you deepen, grow bolder as you grow braver. It is not a finished thing. It is a living one.
And when you forget — and you will forget, because we all forget, because forgetting is part of the human condition and not a sign that you have failed — come yet again. Come, come.
When you have finished, read it aloud. Once. To yourself as the first and most important witness.
Keep what you have written. Return to it. Let it change as you change, deepen as you deepen, grow bolder as you grow braver. It is not a finished thing. It is a living one.
And when you forget — and you will forget, because we all forget, because forgetting is part of the human condition and not a sign that you have failed — come yet again. Come, come.
You are not trying to hold yourself at the centre once and for all. You are learning, with head, heart, and gut, how to find your way back.
