Self-help Resources:
Mindfulness in Poetry
LOVE AFTER LOVE
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 this 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 have 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 --
WILD GEESE
You do not have to walk on your knees.
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting---
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
-- Mary Oliver --
FOUR QUARTETS (final stanza)
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown remembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning:
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always-
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
-- T.S. Eliot --
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