Love after Love

The Zen teacher Thich Nhat Hanh has written beautifully about why learning to love others begins with learning to love ourselves; a sentiment that the cynic might dismiss as rhetoric or preaching of how-to books......... but one which more considered reflection reveals to be deeply truthful and deeply uncomfortable.

Love after Love is a poem by Derek Walcott, a 1992 Nobel for Lit; a poetic ode to the same sentiment, on being at home in ourselves.......

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.