Love After Love: A Poetic Exploration (Part 4/5)

Issue #16

Thank you for joining us for the fourth part of our five part reflection on Derek Walcott’s poem, “Love After Love.” We do suggest that with each installment, you review his brief poem. Please see our first part of this mini-series for the poem and it is also easy to find on the web.

The poet comes to an interesting part of the poem with a simple command: “Sit here.” This is something too many of us don’t do when we are in the midst of distress. Here we go with section seven of our exploration.

Seven: Sit here

One has to “sit” for a while to get to this place of “coming home.” There is the invitation to the feast that may begin with “Please, everyone, sit. Dinner is served.” But there are other meanings to the word “sit” here as well. One may need to sit and reflect upon life for a while, to what led up to the current situation. One may also have to “sit” in the mess for a while as part of the healing process. One may have to stop running away and just sit. As the old saying goes, “Don’t just do something. Sit there.” It is an invitation to pause, to breathe, to wait.

A lot of people have a hard time sitting with pain – their own and/or that of others. They want to keep moving, or ease their pain through self-medication, or try to ignore or deny the pain. None of these really help except temporarily. Sitting is being with the pain, the hurt, the heartache, but we need to sit shiva in our mourning and not deny it.

One day we may get so tired of it that we are done and truly ready to move on, but this usually has to happen organically if it is to be real. (Note: To be clear, we are talking more about situational pain, not lifelong endogenous depression that may require different interventions.) David Whyte, in one of his presentations, talks about the importance of growing so tired of ourselves sometimes as the key to getting past that with which we are dealing. It is a true and somewhat humorous look on things. We’ve all gotten tired of hearing a loved one complain about the same thing. We listen and try to be there, but there is also that thought that just says, “Can you move on from this?” If we are wise, we don’t utter those words to the person complaining. This is true to for ourselves as well. It is a balancing act. We all need time to be in our pain and hear ourselves complain over and over again. It is part of the healing. One day, we grow sick and tired of feeling sick and tired.

Reflection: In what ways do you struggle sitting with difficult emotions? What do you tend to do what this happens? Some of us sooth themselves through too much food, sleep, or alcohol even though this only makes a hard situation worse. Some of us may throw ourselves into our work or a manic kind of activity. Guided meditation apps on our smartphones can help us to slow down a bit and learn to sit with ourselves and our pain. By doing this even a few minutes daily, we can learn to live with difficult feelings and find that we can survive them.

Eight: Eat.

The invitation to eat is one that is welcomed by most as genuine care. The invitation to eat is an expression of love, nurturance, sustainability. It is the invitation to keep living even when one does not feel like living or eating as that continues the living. It is the chicken soup, the elixir of all elixirs. Think of a time when you were so down and out that you did not even want to eat but you allowed a dear friend to coax you to do so. You know you needed to eat, but you had grown perhaps too tired and too weary to care. You may have just as soon laid down and died. But a friend, known or not, said, “You must eat.” And you knew they were right. Sometimes we need to be the patient who is fed and not the doctor who feeds. This is especially hard for those of us most comfortable being the doctor, the helper. We are willing to feed anyone at any time, but do not see or feel the value in being fed. It is the divide between the intellectual understanding of what is needed and the feeling element of not being worthy…or of just having lost all interest.

Reflection: What makes it hard for you to allow yourself to be cared for by another? Vulnerability can be a difficult thing? For those of you who tend to be caregivers, what would allow you to be cared for by others on occasion?

Nine: You will love again the stranger who was your self.

This is the poet’s first reference to “the stranger” and he tells us quite directly who that stranger is. It is “your self.” This is different from “yourself.” He uses the past tense here, “who was your self.” We might be inclined to wonder what happened to that self. It could be, as discussed above, that the individual just got so lost in the false self, in the drama of others, in a job that nearly killed them, or any other such thing. We can all easily lose ourselves along the way, but we have help in losing ourselves…the needs of others and our complete acquiescence to those “needs” are two likely suspects.

Jim remembers telling someone he knew fairly well the truth one day when they asked him how he was doing. “Actually, not well,” he said. “I’m really struggling with depression.” The person looked at me and said, “Oh, no. You are good. You are always happy.” Naturally, that conversation was over immediately. But he did wonder, had he given this person, and others, the impression that I really was fine? Had he been performing the lie so well, that he fooled many people? Perhaps it was the intersection of his performance and the fact that a lot of people would prefer that we keep performing. In a sense, we collude with others as we develop this false self and parade it around for all the world to see.

We exist in a world filled with a cliched understanding when it comes to human suffering. In truth, we don’t know what to say very often in the face of pain. This is interesting as we have all been in pain and we can’t think of a single person who has been helped by a cliché. “You are strong. You have this.” “Everything is going to be fine.” “Try not to think about it.” So, why is it so hard to say, “I am so sorry. This sounds very difficult. I’m here for you. Would you tell me more?” Such an expression is an invitation to the other to be themselves, their self, in the presence of another. It is an invitation that encourages one to not be a stranger to themselves.

The phrase “you will love again” is so strong and confident. It is not the off the cuff, “You’ll be fine.” We believe the poet is expressing a faith that, as a result of all the hard work, you will find that the object of your love (a healthy self-love) will emerge from this struggle. When we are in a pained state we may say, “I don’t like myself.” Perhaps the real issue is “I don’t like who I have become.” And, if one has spent years cultivating a false self, essentially a stranger, perhaps not liking what one has become is the beginning of coming to a greater understanding or revelation about one’s true self.

There is another river that feeds into this ocean of falseness and can further turn ourselves into a stranger to ourselves. This other river is the denial of elements of ourselves that we may not like or that are not flattering. This is the land of the rejected parts of the self. We see certain things in ourselves – bitterness, jealousy, envy, pettiness – that we don’t like and say, “Oh, that’s not me.” If we are being honest with ourselves, we may do better by saying, “Ugh. I feel/act that way. What do I want to do differently so I do not become that way all the time?”

The affirmation of “your self” feels like the crux of this poem. It suggests that this individual (the poet, you, me, all of us) have lots of work to do to recover this truer self, but that truer self is there beneath all the false surface level presentation. That is hopeful.

Reflection: Think of the common expression, “I just don’t feel like myself.” What does that mean to you personally? What does myself feel like? The person is usually meaning that they just feel a little off, a little under the weather perhaps. But what if we take that several steps deeper and, looking back on our lives, recognize that we have not been ourselves in years? 

Ten: Give wine. Give bread.

The sacramental nature of wine and bread highlights the importance of this “coming home.” The selection of wine and bread, a celebration of the eucharist, brings up images of the Last Supper. It elevates the experience to that of a spiritual one.

The coming home aspects bring to mind the parable of the prodigal son. In the biblical story, the son demands his inheritance from his father. He goes off and squanders it until he is beyond down and out. He realizes that he must return to his father in shame. But his father is faithful to his son. From the way the story is written, one gets the sense that the father is always on the lookout for his son’s return. The story is an example of God’s ever-present love for us even when we mess up. But we can also look at the story in the context of the father being that part of us that is the true self, the part of us who watches us on our messy, sloppy journey, replete with mistakes, but remains faithful and wanting us to return. That true self waits for us to come home. That coming home is a joy. In the parable, the father does not chastise his son. He does not do all the things we do to ourselves. He does not say, “You idiot! What were you thinking? Where the heck have you been!” No. He embraces his son and throws a feast for him to welcome him home. “For this son of mine was dead and is alive; he was lost and is found.” The true self is just glad you are back.

Reflection: Try to imagine your true self waiting for you. That true self sees you in the distance. You may barely be able to make them out, but you know they can see you clearly. Imagine who it is that they see. Yes, they can see your flaws and your faults, the struggles and your pain. They are waiting for you to come home to who you are, without any judgement. Imagine, if you can, that you are approaching this true self who loves you as deeply as any parent could and who wants nothing from you, but only wants you to be able to see the person you really are. What would you do with such incredible acceptance? What would you do with that hug that is life-giving, not suffocating? Imagine taking in such a love that comes at no price and with no expectations.

Eleven: Give back your heart to itself

There is a powerful line from Bob Dylan in his song, “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right.” He wrote, “I gave her my heart, but she wanted my soul.” We speak of giving our heart away to others, especially to a specific other in a romantic relationship. There are people who want more than that from us and that is clearly not healthy. But should we even “give” our heart to someone in that romantic and poetic way? The common expression of feeling at the end of a relationship is for people to say that they feel heartbroken. (Heartbreak by Florence Williams is an excellent and readable exploration of the very real phenomenon of “heartbreak.”) What does it mean to make ourselves so vulnerable as to entrust our heart to someone? There is a point where we give over more than our heart to someone and it shifts to giving away our soul as Dylan wrote. We can lose ourselves in the mix.

What does it mean to give back your heart to itself? In some ways, we are returning our heart to its rightful “owner.” We need it to survive in a literal sense, but we also need to keep it our own in a metaphoric way as well. The poet uses the word “give” three times in one line. And it has to do with giving to oneself.

In the movie, “Out of Africa.” Denys Finch Hatton says to his lover, Karen Blixen, “I don’t want to find out one day that I’m at the end of someone else’s life.” He is fiercely committed to his individuality and pays the price of loneliness for it sometimes. He knows that those are the terms of a radical commitment, to not adapting constantly to others. This can sound very selfish, but is it? Where is the balance that allows space for the romantic sense of deep connection with another and the part of ourselves that needs to be a bit protective and have healthy boundaries? If you are just at the end of someone else’s life, who are you? An afterthought?

Likewise, have we become an afterthought to our true or truer self? How much time do we give to recovering our true nature and then living from that true self? 

Reflection: In what ways have you become an afterthought in your own life? How can you start reclaiming your heart, knowing what it loves and feeding that heart again, but not with others in the sense of attachment? Remember, connection can exist without excessive attachment.

Twelve: To the stranger who has loved you / all your life, whom you ignored /
for another, who knows you by heart.

Now, we come to the stranger again. The poet wants to bring this point of estrangement home to the reader. It is like we were off having an affair with the rest of the world and ignoring our true self who was faithful, who waited by the fire, keeping the hearth warm for our return. This stranger is the one who actually knows us. Somehow, there was a core part of the self that survived all the battering life, inflicted by our false self and by others. Perhaps this is the still and tiny voice deep in the soul. Was it protected? Is it somehow stronger than all the forces of nature? That core has been there the whole time and has witnessed much. We probably collaborated with others to keep that voice muffled if not silent.

The idea of ignoring our true self is interesting. Why would we be inclined to ignore that true self in favor of the false self? Is it easier to lean into the false self? What happens when we start saying “No” to our false self and then saying “Yes” to this emerging truer self? How would that change how you spent your day, the people with whom you surround yourself, the interests that you pursue?

The interesting use of the present tense is very encouraging: “who knows you by heart.” Deep inside of you the true self is still there and wanting you to come home. There is a warmth in this like above with the prodigal son. Again, there is no judgement here. Rather, as we see in the next line, there is joy, a certain deep connection and contentment. This is a beautiful coming home.

Once you begin to really connect with our true self, don’t expect for everyone to be happy. In fact, you are likely to meet with a great deal of resistance and people telling you that you do not seem like yourself (your false self). But it is likely that you may be on a truer path to who you really are. If so, you can always say to people who tell you that you don’t seem like yourself, “Wonderful! I am so glad. Thank you.”

One mild caution would be to make sure you are not creating a new false self. Some people who do not have a particularly stable personality may look for quick fixes. They think they have found themselves, but they are just creating a new (and sometimes exciting) false self. One of the ways of knowing if this is true is that these new false selves tend to bring more chaos and less of a sense of genuine peace. They can be more manic and forced. There is more of a tendency to crash, rather than to come home to oneself in a calm and loving manner.

Reflection: Think of the people who really know you and love you anyway. Do you have many of those people in your life? Are many of the people in your life people who know your false self (partly or largely because that is what you have shown them)? If you are fortunate to have people who truly know you, sometimes even better than you know yourself, why do they love you? What deeply engrained personality traits could be linked to your true self?

Needless to say, this is a rather heavy and deep topic to explore. It is the stuff of deep thinking and feeling. This is why reviewing the poem several times, journaling, and perhaps taking a look, if it is helpful, at the reflections we offered again may be helpful. One more section to go!

Thinking of you all as we work through this heavy stuff. May it lead, in the end, to joy and a greater sense of freedom.

Jim and Linda

* Ka-tet - A group of people bound together by ka (destiny) for a sense of purpose. Credit: Stephen King from his novel, The Gunslinger.

TEO Ka-tet is the property of James Burke and Linda Pierce operating as TEOconsulting, LLC

https://teoconsulting.org/

Jim@teoconsulting.org

Linda@teoconsulting.org