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Trying to be OK when it's not OK 

Picture

The Guest House
by Jalaluddin Rumi 

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
As an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.
The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing and invite them in.
Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond. 

​Mary  says: This poem is written by a thirteenth century Persian mystic,  but I came across it when a copy was given to me by a Catholic priest at a wedding reception. My own marriage was falling apart and I was overcome with grief and couldn't stop crying at the reception  - I can't remember what the priest (or anyone else) said , but I do remember he gave me a small laminated copy of this ancient poem from his pocket.  I still felt  overwhelmed  and ashamed and I'm sure many thought me mean - but the priest's kindness helped me to  try to accept that all feelings are valid and we have to learn to live alongside our sorrows as well as our joys.

Everything I have been and have not been

19/2/2021

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Liza wrote -  Everything I have been and have not been, offered up in love. What a relief this thought is, freeing us from the endless feeling of insufficiency. The “insufficiency feeling” was something that Stevie Smith described keenly, a source of her persistent depressions, but knowing this feeling so well she could turn it into words and word pictures that helped to free her. She wrested moments of light from books and life and offered them back, flesh made words — to her readers and to her God, who crunches and grows fat on our pain and our love, so that nothing of life is ever wasted. 

God the Eater by Stevie Smith

 There is a god in whom I do not believe
Yet to this god my love stretches,
This god whom I do not believe in is
My whole life, my life and I am his.
 
Everything that I have of pleasure and pain
(Of pain, of bitter pain and men's contempt)
I give this god for him to feed upon
As he is my whole life and I am his.
 
When I am dead I hope that he will eat
Everything I have been and have not been
And crunch and feed upon it and grow fat
Eating my life all up as it is his.
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