Love After Love

I have been reflecting of late on Derek Walcott's 'Love after Love'.

Maybe you have a picture in your mind of a person you miss and would like to meet again?

Or maybe that picture is of the 'old you', or 'real you' that has been ground down by the vicissitudes of life? Perhaps you have been questioning your identity, or your self-confidence has taken a hard knock and you no longer feel like 'yourself'?

To fully immerse ourselves in loving another, we have to love ourselves first. To do that requires honesty and the courage to commit to the hard work of feeling, exploring, processing, and ultimately integrating our emotional pain, the sting of disappointment or rejection into our 'self'.

There's much to be said about all of that, but in the meantime, here's Walcott's perspective expressed so beautifully:

'The time will come

when, with elation

you will greet yourself arriving

at your own door, in your own mirror

and each will smile at the other's welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.

You will love again the stranger who was your self.

Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart

to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored

for another, who knows you by heart.

Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,

peel your own image from the mirror.

Sit. Feast on your life'.

Isn't that just wonderful?