Love After Love

This was one of the first poems I heard in Savasana when I was taking David Vendetti's class back at Back Bay Yoga before I became a yoga teacher.  It really spoke to me then (2003) and again when I picked up the book "The Time Traveller's Wife" a couple of years later.  It graced the first page of the book and I remember again it's simple but potent message of coming back to ourselves.   That's when I started to read it to my classes.  I heard it again in a speech give by Jon Kabat-Zinn to Google employees a year or two ago.  Tonight it resurfaced in my brain and I thought...better share it with all of you.  You just might need to hear it.

LOVE AFTER LOVE  by Derek Walcott

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.