Things are going to get lighter ..

Today is the shortest day of 2011. With that in mind - and the imminence of pervasive Christmas frivolities and feasting - here are some of my mid-winter reflections.  I leave it to you to reflect on possible relevance to the RSA's work in thought leadership linked to social innovation ... 

Our contemporary world, with all its measurist preoccupation with 'the mechanical', continues to need poetry.  How wise may the people of the Irish Republic turn out to have been in their recent election of Michael D Higgins, a poet and philosopher, as President of Ireland? [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AI3N-Tat81E&feature=related ]  Time will tell.  As one of the poems I've been re-reading puts it: 'A people sometimes ..elect an honest man; decide they care ...' 

Poetry can have amazing power - resonating with our lives, touching our hearts, stirring our thoughts, lifting our spirits. For reasons I know not, several quite different poems have come to mind. And somehow it seems appropriate in this moment to share one of these with whomsoever may choose to pause and peruse.

'Love After Love', by Derek Walcott, seems to touch on the second of those two ancient Hebrew exhortations - some call them 'commandments' still - that we should love our neighbour as ourselves.

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 image from the mirror.

Sit. Feast on your life.

I first came across 'Love After Love', around Christmas 2002, in a 'dangerous little book' by Roger Housden, 'Ten Poems to Change Your Life' I'm reading again some of Housden's reflections on Walcott's poem - and I will simply reproduce these here as a sort of quiet mid-winter gift to you, the reader:

We spend much of our lives trying to make ourselves - to create the life we want, to forge some reality from our dreams. ... ... We may push and shove through our lifetime before realizing that another voice is whispering beneath the fret of our efforts ... ...

I love the festival of homecoming that Walcott conjures here. 'Give wine. Give bread'. This is a joyous communion with yourself, with the life that 'knows you by heart', knows every twist and turn you have made. ...

... Perhaps you have absorbed yourself in confusion and self-doubt for a couple of decades, or become satisfied with a comfortable, though empty, life of conformity. Perhaps ... you have covered yourself in the veil of loss and have fed on old memories for too long. Wherever you may have hidden yourself, there is always time to come out into the light of day. And that time, the poet says, is now. Now is the time to feast on your life.

This morning, I was cheered by the closing words in a moving personal piece shared on Twitter:

 'Today is the shortest day. It is dark and dank and miserable out there. Things are going to get lighter.' 

Yes, indeed!