It’s a funny thing, this Life. I have always been in love with it. I have been in love with a path, with someone else’s life, with an ideal in my heart, an idea of how it should be in my head, or even with the past or the future Life I did or would live.
But things change. I know I have. I now am in love with Life as it fills me up. Life as it alivens me, animates me. The me I am. Not me yesterday, not me tomorrow. Not me through someone else’s eyes, not me created by an idea or me developed through an ideal. Just me. The me I feel, the me I enjoy being. This ever changing, me.
I subscribe to Dr. Sharon Blackie’s emails (she’s wonderful, here is her website), and this morning she shared a poem that resonated with me deeply. Here it:
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
Love after love… Love after heartbreak, love after forgetting oneself, love after being lost, love after working hard to measure up, love after self abandonment, love after denial, love…always there for us, even if we forget.
So, I am wondering.. why is it that so many of us waste so much of our Life looking around and trying to measure up or eat the same things that are on other people’s tables… why do we sometimes lose ourselves when loving another, or want what others have, when our Life tastes just as good, actually better, because on our Life we can actually feast on.
There’s nothing I want more for you than for you to be comfortable in your own skin. For you to be content in being you. For you to let go of ideals and rules of how being and living should look like, and for you to feel and create yourself as you please, as it feels right, as you dream.
May you feast on your life.
Maria Jacobs 
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