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Mola`a Bay

Home. Tricky concept. As I was scrubbing the red dirt patterned floorboards of my dear friend’s new home, I was grateful for the work. There seems to be an innavigable amount of work these days: moving thoughts, reorganizing expectations, shifting space, diminishing returns.

I get disoriented in my mind without a map.

Which was why, I was grateful to be standing in my hands. My house needed to be cleaned, too, yet, cleaning hers felt easier, more definite, more doable.

Why can we see so clearly the clutter of another, yet get mired in our own mirror?

Emotional attachment. That’s what I am doubling down on. When it is our story, the red is more red, the water is wetter, and no one truly understands. Except the world knows only so many stories, and She tells them in multitudinous ways. Remember the last time you were on a deserted island, and a beloved said, “Me too,” and that was population enough?

Yes, home is where the heart is; just left of the panic button that says we are not doing, being, having or deserving enough.

So when next the time to shift and shelve arises, look around the plentitude of your life, against the desert of the unknown; be grateful for the old remembrances and happy enough to realize that when More knocks on your door, it is a belief in you, that you do know how to walk in the dark, by the light of your heart, as you have before.

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 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