Morning Visitors

THE GUEST HOUSE

 

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. 

 

                                                            -Rumi (translated by Coleman Barks)

 

Isn’t it remarkable how someone can speak across 800 years and 10,000 miles to my present condition? Offer me a spiritual perspective on my post-election pain and suffering that puts it all in a larger context? Ask me to consider what feels like disaster as something else entirely? If not politically, at least personally? I can think of three cases where poets were invited to the political table to offer new vistas of the social landscape and contribute to the national discourse— W.B. Yeats in Ireland, Pablo Neruda in Chile and Vaclav Havel in Czech Republic. Here in the good old U.S.A., we could not be further from that possibility. Though Robert Frost, Maya Angelou and Amanda Gorman have spoken at Presidential Inaugurations and we have all been the better for it.

 

But this was not sent me to my bookshelf this morning to find this poem. These days, I have other morning visitors on the physical landscape of my body. Woke up with a charley horse in my calf and had to wonder “Why?” Not like I had run a marathon yesterday. These days, it feels like each morning another unwelcome guest has walked over my body— the vast field of my back aching in new and unexpected places, a stiff neck, a throbbing tooth, a mole suddenly appearing on my cheek (this one looks like it’s moved in permanently). 

I don’t believe these are the guests Rumi’s talking about, but maybe I need to meet them and greet them in the same way. Perhaps naïve to imagine that these are benevolent teachers sent from afar and accept that they’re simply the signs of the decay of this aging body, the signposts of mortality. But in any case, worth considering just meeting them with open arms, if nothing else because they are signs that I’m still here, alive, breathing and open to the gifts of the day. That’s something. 

 

And so I limp down the hall to make my morning oatmeal.