Love after Love

Red leaf in sun & shadow
Originally uploaded by Seeking Tao

This morning I was listening to John Kabat-Zinn being interviewed on Speaking of Faith. He was giving an articulate argument for mindfulness but my curiosity was peaked when he was asked to address the fact that his father had been a scientist and his mother an artist.

These are my roots too.
The mixing of these two opposites play out in my life each day.
Kabat-Zinn was asked to explain.

He declined a “cognitive” reply and chose instead a poem saying, "it's not very long, but it really hinges around just this issue of who we are and how much we split ourselves apart."

Love After Love

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.

Derek Walcott