The Caribbean poet and playwright Derek Walcott has a stunning poem harking back to Rumi’s The Visitor Home.
The poem is named Love After Love.
Reunion is a key theme of the poem. After a lifetime of needing folks and issues exterior of ourselves, we come residence. To the one that’s been there with you all alongside.
Your self.
Now, I really 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 be taught from mindfulness meditation.
Once we observe, we return to ourselves, many times 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 observe daily.
I’ve been meditating commonly for over 27 years, and I’m nonetheless shocked on the energy of my very own thoughts to delude me. You’d suppose at this level it wouldn’t be a shock, proper!?
However practically each time I sit all the way down to observe, I’m dazzled by the facility of the human thoughts. We’ve got 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’s at all times this second, once 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 automotive 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 properly have been 1,000,000 miles away. All this was taking place—the thrum of Life—however I wasn’t there. I felt none of it. Not less than 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 so on. Once we’re in it, we’re probably not 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 many times. To construct a brand new behavior of being, the place we abide within the right here and now, absolutely 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 suppose 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 an additional, 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.