Feast on your life! For all my English-speaking friends.

Feast on your life

In honor of my English-speaking friends, whom I have noticed have discovered my blog, I will from time to time write something in English. Having grown up in a country foreign to my national roots, I am both blessed and slightly cursed (such a strong word, I think), to have had so many factors influencing my life throughout my childhood years.

It is certainly a blessing to have been accustomed to other cultures than my own, my eyes being opened to the fact that there are other ways of doing things and living life. I am not afraid of the world, not scared to leave the safety behind Danish borders - I find travelling fun and enjoyable, aswell as healthily mind stretching. (Not to mention the fact that sometimes, travelling leaves you grateful for what you actually do have at home.)

But having grown up exposed, if you will, to other cultures (in my case at least 2 other than my own), I have also found myself lost in identity. Questions concerning my true identity and nature have earlier on overwhelmed me completely. I wasn't truely Danish, nor Tanzanian, nor American. 

I was just a sorry mix. 

To make a long story short, however, I found myself through a year of therapeutic sessions, much prayer and many tears. Long conversations and times of quite soulsearching were necesarry too. Finally I felt peacefull. I finally found myself. 

My heart skipped a beat and I silently rejoiced when I read Derek Walcotts poem Love after Love, because I felt it summed up, in few words, much of the journey that I had travelled from insignificance to knowing my self:

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.