bloodteethandflame

I know that this may come a little late, as it is nearly mid-February, but this is my second year of doing My One Word.

While last year’s word was definitely Allow, my realization of this year’s word proved to be more subtle… but no less profound than Allow had been.

Though, unlike Allow, I didn’t grasp my One Word as quickly this year.

Actually, this year’s word is actually a compound word:

Self-Love

I have come to realize that I have been avoiding working on the concepts associated with Self-Love for a rather long time.

Though, in late January, it became quite clear to me that as much as I thought that I’d done pretty well learning how to Allow myself to feel and to act (rather than react) and to build upon other shadow work I’d done over the last year, there was definitely an aspect of that Allow shadow-work that I’d been avoiding.

And I got the impression from Them that I could not afford to ignore that aspect anymore.

Thus, I discovered that Self-Love was the missing piece.

~~~

Or, as They have often impressed upon me:

No one is going to love you exactly the way that you need to be loved, so you may as well learn to love yourself.

~~~

Tom Hiddleston reads Derek Walcott’s lovely poem, 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.

~~~