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The Caribbean poet and playwright Derek Walcott has a beautiful poem harking back to Rumi’s The Guest House.
The poem is named Love After Love.
Reunion is a key theme of the poem. After a lifetime of needing individuals and issues exterior of ourselves, we come residence. To the one who’s been there with you all alongside.
Your self.
Now, I like the poem for the sheer and easy great thing about the phrases and the nuanced message.
However I can’t assist however discover the way it elegantly encapsulates a key lesson we study from mindfulness meditation.
Once we observe, we return to ourselves, repeatedly and once more. The place did we go, that we should return? Certainly, we don’t at all times notice that we’re misplaced.
However that’s precisely why the good masters exhort us to practice every day.
I’ve been meditating recurrently for over 27 years, and I’m nonetheless shocked on the energy of my very own thoughts to delude me. You’d assume at this level it wouldn’t be a shock, proper!?
However almost each time I sit all the way down to observe, I’m dazzled by the facility of the human thoughts. Now we have these narratives spinning up in our heads on a regular basis. We’re fantasizing about different futures. We’re nursing grudges, resentments, and regrets from the previous.
And for me there may be at all times this second, after I drop into the zone of observe and slip seamlessly into the current second.
In that house, all of the deluding filters soften away.
In these moments, it’s like a recent breeze simply blew in. I can really feel it on my pores and skin. My ears open up, and I can hear automobile engines whirring within the distance, birds crooning and calling, canines barking into house, crickets chorusing.
My animal physique melts because the sounds resound inside me.
But simply moments in the past, I would as effectively have been one million miles away. All this was taking place—the thrum of Life—however I wasn’t there. I felt none of it. A minimum of not consciously.
And that’s the dazzling energy of our minds to solid a veil over our consciousness.
Name it thoughts wandering, discursive considering, the default mode community, and many others. Once we’re in it, we’re not likely right here on this actuality. We’re someplace in between. And we spend A LOT of time in that realm—not fairly asleep and never fairly awake.
That’s why Ram Dass wrote a complete e-book known as Be Right here Now! To induce you and me to come back again residence to ourselves repeatedly. To construct a brand new behavior of being, the place we abide within the right here and now, totally in our our bodies, awake to our senses, and deeply alive.
This, I consider, is the bounty and richness, the form of love that Derek Walcott is nodding to in his poem.
So right here’s the poem. Let me know what you assume and whether or not it rings true for you too.
LOVE AFTER LOVE
by Derek Walcott
The time will come
when, with elation,
you’ll greet your self arriving
at your personal door, in your personal mirror,
and every will smile on the different’s welcome,
and say, sit right here. Eat.
You’ll love once more the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give again your coronary heart
to itself, to the stranger who has beloved you
all of your life, whom you ignored
for one more, who is aware of you by coronary heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,
the pictures, the determined notes,
peel your personal picture from the mirror.
Sit. Feast in your life.
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