Heartbreak

When I turned 60 I started to take photos and post them on Instagram every day in an attempt to honor each one - to just be able to remember - to pay more attention to how I'm spending my days.  

On November 22, 2019, I didn't imagine days like this - even as 60 put into sharper focus the realities of chronos/linear time.  I have spent hours, days and dreamscape times thinking about my life, my legacy, my work to do before I die, hoping and praying that the Universe will show me the way to go and that I'll have the courage to get into the arena everyday.  Third chapter, relevance, aging. 

Now the days of being 60 have intersected with the days of living in the pandemic - days of the plague.  Everything, everything, everything is different - and - this everything was always so:  we are bound by our humanity, our fragility. We have hearts that break.

Today I remembered a podcast that I listened to from Parker Palmer about heartbreak.  He said  "A brittle heart will explode into a thousand pieces, and sometimes get thrown like a fragment grenade at the perceived source of its pain — there’s a lot of that going around these days. But a supple heart will break open into a greater capacity to hold life’s suffering and its joy..."

I think of the moments when I've felt the closest to something bigger than me-to a Divine presence - all moments of heartbreak: those moments that are so bitter, piercing through your breastbone into your literal and spiritual heart space, drawing everything-- body, mind and heart --to circle around that pain, and also...to  unbelievably bask in the burst of beauty, sweetness and solidarity that lies there with it.    

My heartbreak this week came  in the small, personal moments, in what friends were sharing,  and in the global suffering:  pleads for medical supplies, disinfecting items from the grocery store, the hopefulness of a young man overjoyed about starting Guilford College in the fall, dreams of an embrace. 

Heartbreak is politically powerful. In The Politics of the Brokenhearted  Parker Palmer talks about holding the tensions of democracy:

"The capacity to hold tensions creatively is the key to much that matters—from a life lived in love to a democracy worthy of the name to even the most modest movement toward peace between nations. So those of us who care about such things must work to root out the seeds of violence in our culture, including its impatience and its incessant drive toward control. And since culture is a human creation, whose deformations begin not “out there” but in our inner lives, we can transform our culture only as we are inwardly transformed."

I found this especially helpful today - you can read the full essay here:
http://www.couragerenewal.org/parker/writings/politics-of-the-brokenhearted/

Palmer shared this poem from Mary Oliver, in his podcast, where the poet invites us into heartbreak " — not because she wants us to wallow in suffering, but to help us become more open and responsive to a suffering world. 

Lead

Here is a story
to break your heart.
Are you willing?
This winter
the loons came to our harbor
and died, one by one,
of nothing we could see.
A friend told me
of one on the shore
that lifted its head and opened
the elegant beak and cried out
in the long, sweet savoring of its life
which, if you have heard it,
you know is a sacred thing,
and for which, if you have not heard it,
you had better hurry to where
they still sing.
And, believe me, tell no one
just where that is.
The next morning
this loon, speckled
and iridescent and with a plan
to fly home
to some hidden lake,
was dead on the shore.
I tell you this
to break your heart,
by which I mean only
that it break open and never close again
to the rest of the world.

~ Mary Oliver ~

Finally from Palmer, "So here’s a question I like to ask myself: What can I do day-by-day to make my heart more supple?"

Peace - and thank you for making my heart more supple.