06 May 2009

Feast on Your Life

It's been a hectic, kinda sad, kinda wonderful week. Working more at work so not on the up and up as far as posting goes...but for whoever out there who does check in, I found this poem too wonderful not to share. Putting yourself first in this way, remembering,

"Wow, look at me, I mean, I AM ALIVE, I have this amazing machine in my skull, and this love and this sorrow and this laughter that pours out of my heart and my mouth and my skin, that makes my blood race and my back ache and my bonesswell somehow with love for everything. I am here. All this that I see, those baby geese swimming on the lake, the way I love spring breezes, the way jasmine swells, the way it feels to hold a baby. All this, too. And me, too? REALLY? WOW."

Whatever this living is, whatever this life is, we are here. Don't let your beauty pass you by...like trees growing, our inner and outer beauty shifts and changes, provides different, equally beautiful and bountiful and painful offerings.

I'm learning to give myself permission to love me. And why shouldn't I? To quote Marianne Williamson from her book A Return to Love:

“Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”

We have a divine obligation. So glad to have woken up today, to have woken up awake, to know in my body that those I love, when their bodies I've known well or fleetingly, pass in violence or in peace, which has happened lately, are so very happy and so very free.

Never woulda happened 3 years ago, when I found myself dangerously close to never waking up again. So now I feast ravenously, relishingly, ravishingly, with joy. On my own amazing, precious self. Now, you try it, too. Without further ado, here's this:

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.

By Dereck Walcott. Discovered via this interview with Job Kabat-Zinn on Speaking of Faith. Picture is of my Grandma Jerry when she was 101 & fading like paper, but still feasting on life. She was a woman who knew herself, enjoyed her own company, and shone light all about her. I miss her.