You Are Not a Troubled Guest

This line has been stuck in my head all week. It's from David Whyte's poem "What to Remember When Waking" excerpted below.

“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.
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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?”

How often do I move through life feeling alienated from belonging? For how long have I believed my own story that I am an unwanted trespasser? We fold in on ourselves and make ourselves quiet because we have been told and continue to tell ourselves that what we feel and experience is incorrect or unlikeable. That what we ask for is beyond reach, too expansive.

We are not here accidentally. And we are not here to have some idealized experience of life, where we only feel that which is good, likeable, and marketable.

Sit beside yourself and ask, what are you feeling right now? Know that whatever that feeling is, it is acceptable as your experience of the present. There are no wrong answers. The more we belong to ourselves, the more we are at home in the world. We grow expansive and spread our branches against a future sky.