presencing your wholeness

Derek Walcott, “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.
 
“Love After Love” from The Poetry of Derek Walcott 1948-2013 by Derek Walcott, selected by Glyn Maxwell. Copyright © 2014 by Derek Walcott. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. All rights reserved. And from Collected Poems 1948-1984, used by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd.
 
 
George Herbert, “Love (III)”
 
Love bade me welcome. Yet my soul drew back
Guilty of dust and sin.
But quick-eyed Love, observing me grow slack
From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning,
If I lacked any thing.
 
A guest, I answered, worthy to be here:
Love said, You shall be he.
I the unkind, ungrateful? Ah my dear,
I cannot look on thee.
Love took my hand, and smiling did reply,
Who made the eyes but I?
 
Truth Lord, but I have marred them: let my shame
Go where it doth deserve.
And know you not, says Love, who bore the blame?
My dear, then I will serve.
You must sit down, says Love, and taste my meat:
So I did sit and eat.
 
“Love (III)” by George Herbert is in the public domain.
 
 
POETIC THEMES
            The poem to celebrate the official beginning of summer on the 21st would be Mary Oliver’s “The Summer Day,” a poem that begins with a question about God and ends with a recipe for prayer. We don’t need to know our creator; we just have to commit to feeling its creation, moment by moment. This is the religious imperative of Oliver’s oeuvre as a whole—an agnostic worship of the world. And I do mean worship in its etymological sense: what is worthy of our attention. We pay attention, like cash money; we devote our attention, the most precious of gifts. The poem is not about a summer’s day; it’s entitled “The Summer Day.” This one you’re in. It’s not just any grasshopper, it is a particular one.
            This difference could be illustrated via a longstanding debate about how to translate a famous (perhaps the most famous) haiku. The story is that Basho, the renown Japanese poet of the Edo period, was challenged by his Zen master with a Koan (or riddle), and he responded with a haiku about mindfulness. Here’s the literal translation: Fu-ru (old) i-ke (pond) ya, ka-wa-zu (frog) to-bi-ko-mu (jumping into) mi-zu (water) no o-to (sound). Do we liken the pond to the mind and the splash to a thought? If so, should it be a pond or the pond? A frog, or the frog? Is the focus on the water, the jump, or the sound? You can google the Basho translation debate and find a whole world there. But suffice it to say, the message of “The Summer Day,” like the frog haiku, is about presence. Our singular existence is not all human life, it’s this one we’re living. Every one of us is just as strange and complex, ethereal and earthy. And Oliver’s famous second person address to discern what you’ll do with your time on earth is exportable to every calling that brings us into the immediacy of what we are meant to be and do. We are challenged to drop to our knees and surrender to that calling, offering our lives like a prayer.
            But since Mary Oliver’s angle on devotion is pretty well known, I want to offer a slightly different angle in a poem by Derek Walcott. Why Walcott’s poem for midsummer? Well, first because hunting around for poems about this pagan-turned-Christian holiday (which takes place between June 21st and June 26th in various places over the globe), I found Walcott’s book entitled Midsummer. But then I swam around in the book’s Biblical allusions for a while—most beautifully in a scene of Caribbean yellow butterflies “stuttering ‘yes’ to the resurrection” in “Midsummer LIV.” The bitter, brilliant manipulation of Christian doctrine in Midsummer rang a bell. I was called back to “Love after Love” as the perfect poem for this tension between earthly and Christian love at work in this weird June holiday.
            Walcott is famous for his reappropriations of canonical Western texts. I’m not sure if anyone has ever noted that “Love after Love” speaks to George Herbert's “Love III.” This is the final poem in this 17th-century poet and priest’s collection about spiritual conflict, The Temple. God-as-Love issues an invitation to the poem’s sinful Everyman: “You must sit down, says Love, and taste my meat: / So I did sit and eat.” Herbert’s poem consigns human love to a Christian realm, from which Walcott rescues it.
            The holiday of Midsummer is rife with these tensions. The pagan focus on sexual bonds and romantic love (mating in midsummer means a convenient birth in spring!) become entangled with the birthday of St. John the Baptist and his divine bond with Jesus. This mishmash yields some mighty strange rituals. Somewhere, this week, lovers are jumping over a ceremonial St. John bonfire with their wrists tied together, to cement a bond said to be stronger than blood. Somewhere a man is eating snails to avoid being cuckolded (long story). Somewhere a woman is putting a beauty elixir called “St. John’s Water” on her face or placing a bouquet of carefully-selected magical flowers under her pillow. Some kinky stuff is happening in an all-night vigil somewhere —even in the U.S., according to Louise Glück’s “Midsummer”!
            Walcott adopts the dialogue form of “Love III” to concoct his own magical brew from these tensions between religious and earthly love. We reclaim communion to learn to love our own soul. The bread and wine serve to “Give back your heart / to itself.” What more could one ask of Midsummer’s purported capacity for lifelong bonds than a comingling union with our soul and heart? Body and blood returned to same. In “[The midsummer sea…]” Walcott asks, “Where’s my child’s hymnbook, the poems edged in gold leaf, / the heaven I worship with no faith in heaven, / as the Word turned poetry in its grief?” He provides his own answer: “Ah, bread of life, that only love can leaven!” Only love, Walcott teaches, can leaven the bread of our life. Maybe that’s the message of Midsummer.
 
 
PRACTICE
            We might explore the embodied act of reuniting a self divided in two—body hemispheres, past and present selves, mind and heart, body and soul, thoughts and witness mind. We could use a mirror like the poem’s doorway, where one part of the self greets the other. In tandem with movements that strip down, like actions of “peeling off” layers or “taking down” imaginary facades, we are looking for somatic experiences of melting resistance in forms of surrender, like smiling, sitting, and receiving (gifts, food). We could unburden our shoulders or our neck or wherever we are weighed down by massaging them and flicking the excess tension off the fingers. We could peel off clothing or splay the limbs open to unpeel the core. What would gestures of receiving/feasting look like?
Finally, to explore the act of mirror-gazing, consider this. I used to sit and touch noses with my dad. A quick google search reveals that the touching of noses and foreheads is an ancient greeting involving the transmission of spirit, practiced across many spiritual traditions: the Maori call it Hongi, the Hawaiians name it Honi; and it is practiced in certain parts of Scandinavia, among Tibetans, the desert Bedouins in Southern Jordan, the Inuit, and who knows where else. If it resonates with you that the eye could indeed be the window to the soul, stand with your nose and forehead in contact with a mirror, and as you stare into your own eyes, envision an exchange of power with the image you face. End in some form of relaxed rest, the stillness like a banquet prepared by the soma, to just be savored, “feasting” on your life.