USED Love after love

 

 

 

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

Tears fall as I read this poem. I have lost myself. I yearn for “the stranger who was [my]self.” I wonder how I got here.

I have been on and off a spiritual path since I was 16 years old. I have read thousands of books on spirituality, had a Christian baptism as an adult, learned from Tibetan Buddhist masters, studied myriad modes of spiritual thought, practised yoga and meditation, gone on retreats, spent my life searching, searching, searching.

All I did was accumulate knowledge from external sources.

But now, as I face an ongoing crisis in my health, as I watch my accomplishments disappear, the realization hits me,

I do not really KNOW anything.

I have ignored the voice of my body, of my soul, of my heart. I always preferred the wisdom of others to the voice of my own soul.

My life energy is draining from me. I have quite literally given my power away. My life has been reduced to the four walls of my bedroom and it is slowly dawning on that the restoration of my physical health is inextricably linked to being willing to finally be still, to listen to and follow the guidance of my own soul.

My mind is stuffed with the advice of a hundred self-help gurus, but  here I am, unable to pray, meditate or stretch my way out of the mess I find myself in.

Somewhere along the way, along what I believed to be the shining path to spiritual fulfilment, I got lost. Somewhere in the process of trying to be good, the essential goodness inherent in all of us has been forgotten. The still small voice of internal wisdom was overlooked, drowned out by other people’s voices, other people’s plans, other people’s needs, other peoples expectations.

I see now that my answers can never be found outside myself, in any external source, teacher or book. Of course, these can be useful pointers to the wisdom within, but my tendency has always been to look for teachers and then slavishly follow their advice.  Tell me what to do and I will be a perfect student, eager to please the teacher. This is a painful realisation and even more painful is the admission, to myself, that I do not know another way to be.

I know the answers lie within me, that only I can excavate what is truly right for me. This realisation is coming only as I reach the end of my ability to do anything but lie in bed. I have burned out from too much seeking, too much trying, too much giving. My body has quite literally collapsed with exhaustion and my mind has burned itself out from its incessant searching.  My spirit feels dry and parched, there is no-one to ask,  none of my usual strategies are working.

I hang onto Walcott’s words, “The time will come.”

The time will come, has come, when that still, small voice demands to be heard. Asks me to see what is really here, what is seeking to be born in me. Invites me to take a deep dive into what remains among the debris of the life I so carefully constructed, of the self I so carefully constructed in order that I can let go into what is calling me, what is asking to be seen.

Now is the time to let go of all my striving. To turn inward, to listen to my own soul and to bring back what she has been trying to tell me, first in a whisper, now in a shout. To finally embody her wisdom.

This is the clarion call to return to Love. This is none other than Love calling for my own attention, asking me to return my focus to attending to my own needs as they arise in this moment.

Yet, the impulse persists; I seem hardwired to look outside myself for some other to save me, soothe me, love me. What I am beginning to intuit though is that underneath these feelings of desperate loneliness, of not-enoughness, underneath my need for recognition, validation and acceptance and is Love’s call to return to myself.

 

Rumi said

“Love said to me
There is nothing that is not me
Be silent.”

I want to see if indeed there is nothing else but Love. I want to look deeply into my life and into the world and ask “What is it I need to learn here, how is THIS pointing me back to Love?”

The one thing I know for sure is that I no longer want to follow anyone else’s plan/guru/spiritual path. I want to listen to the voices of those that have travelled this path before me, but I want to test it all in the crucible of my own life. I don’t want second-hand theories, I want to open my heart to Love. I want to live from my soul. I want to “love again the stranger who was yourself”.  I want to give back “your heart to itself”. I want to “feast on your life”.

 I have no idea how to do this.

I suspect though it will be learned through Grace, or not at all.