One simple ingredient in loving your life is loving yourself.
It is the love that comes after all other love and the love that should come before it too. And the love that is always there, waiting for us to recognise and embrace it.
Derek Walcott says it best here in his poem 'Love After Love,' - '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.'
Even Oprah recommends this poem to be read on a daily basis alongside our routine, so that we may learn to simply sit and feast on our lives.
Love After Love - Derek Walcott
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.
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.
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