Friday, January 1, 2010

The Perfect Message On New Year's Day

My lovely friend, Michelle, taught a New Year's yoga class this morning. At the close of the class, she read a poem that spoke volumes to me. When I told her how very much I resonated with the poem, she admitted she'd thought of me when she selected it as a reading for the class. I felt my heart warm. How wonderful is it when a friend can look at your struggles, your challenges, your dreams...and provide something so beautiful, so fitting, so perfect?

Thank you, Michelle, for your years of friendship. For your confidence. For your spirit that wraps itself around me like the warmest imaginable embrace, for your hugs - that are plentiful and spontaneous, for your wisdom, for your eloquence, for being an enigma, an inspiration and a God-like friend. You are a gift to everyone you touch.

For everyone else, there's this, compliments of Michelle:

The House of Belonging
I awoke
this morning
in the gold light
turning this way
and that
thinking for
a moment
it was one
day
like any other.
But
the veil had gone
from my
darkened heart
and I thought
it must have been the quiet
candlelight
that filled my room,
it must have been
the first easy rhythm
with which I breathed
myself to sleep,
it must have been
the prayer I said
speaking to the otherness
of the night.
And
I thought
this is the good day
you could meet your love,
this is the black day
someone close
to you could die.
This is the day
you realize
how easily the thread
is broken
between this world
and the next
and I found myself
sitting up
in the quiet pathway
of light,
the tawny
close grained cedar
burning round
me like a fire
and all the angels of this housely
heaven ascending
through the first
roof of light
the sun has made.
This is the bright home
in which I live,
this is where
I ask
my friends
to come,
this is where I want
to love all the things
it has taken me so long
to learn to love.
This is the temple
of my adult aloneness
and I belong
to that aloneness
as I belong to my life.
There is no house
like the house of belonging.
~ David Whyte ~