sit and feast

Do not arouse or awaken love until it so desires. –Song of Songs 8:4

Some days can be hard, the hardest thing it seems is to just sit with this “singleness” and not chase after the longing inside my heart. Funny, for years and years in my past that is all I ever did, all I ever knew to do was chase after love. It was the idea that hey, when you want something you go after it. I went after the next guy and then the next guy, I went searching like mad for love because I certainly could not sit with myself, with my own person and find love there. The void within was deep and dark; a hole inside of me I was desperate to have filled. I needed someone in my life to validate me, someone to tell me I was lovely, someone to make me feel like I was “enough” to be loved. Funny to be where I find myself sitting today; 30 years old, single and struggling with tremendous heartache yet like no time before, sitting here with all of it, strangely content.

Oh, to surrender the striving, to put all of the forcing and manipulating aside, to actually sit and breathe and trust in a great plan for my life, an actual plan that is actually unfolding. To Sit. To feast on my life, in all of its pain, sorrow, tragedy, joy, beauty and brilliance; to wait patiently for love to come knocking at my door.

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