For what ye need to mend,
When all that breaks only bends…

The shattering is undeniably loud and arresting, and we can’t help but bear the sound as it clamours through our peace, riveting our attention. Folly lies in the linear worldly thrust always forward, denying that time is mysterious, can suddenly STOP, even backwards waltz, to entice us to pick up pieces we forgot. When the heart breaks the best medicine isn’t in a cabinet in your kitchen or bathroom: it’s in the ethereal compartments of memory fields, floating around you. But we can’t get at them unless we give ourselves the greatest gift: time. We need to push back against the busy world, call in sick, cancel appointments, and make sacred space to invite the inevitable initiation of being devastated; of putting to death a love and bearing all the kicking and screaming, all the haunted dreaming, as we carve a hole open in the holy earth and release what was once so golden to the dark arms of transformation. 

Our heart, so achy, is difficult to enter, at least it seems so as we swoop down from our heads among the busy fray to glance at the trauma of cracks and fissures creaking over its shining visage. We must find a way to slow our pace, find a branch to land on as this forest fire rages in the distance. For if we stay long enough we might observe some things we miss in our shallow wading, such as the incandescence shimmering within the cracks. Our longing will shift perchance to a curious gaze as we witness the trees elevating and folding over, forced to buoy by something robust. Ever-steadied through deep breathing devotion, ritual potion, and meditation salve, we finally understand the cracks are not merely from pressures in the outside world but from something bursting below... 

It is perhaps foolhardy to tell a person after the death of love that things will get better. It betrays the moment of grief that we must sink fully into. Instead, a good and wise friend would say something a great writer once told me: there’s no ‘good’ way to deal with a crisis but allowing yourself the time and space to fall apart. Giving yourself that gift to completely be ravaged, denuded, cleansed, by the fires of pain, is highest generosity. It will quicken the healing time but that’s not really what we care about. More importantly, it will put us on the enigmatic path of alchemy, of turning something shitty into gold. For the feelings that are welcomed in fullness are waves of transformative power that will compel our heart to grow even bigger its field of sensitivity, awakening more of our empathy, instilling a deeper compassion and humanity, wising our love. 

There are angels in our midst and the tragedy is not that people don’t believe in them it’s that we never call on them because we don’t feel worthy enough. And perhaps the greatest wound that the broken-heart tells is that deficiency of self-worth, revealing itself when we untangle from the sweet happiness we could have only created with that beloved. In that vacuum, that inevitable emptiness, the travails of biting loneliness, we taste this sudden lack and weep for the fullness that we’re letting go. Yet, stilling in the heart, we can remember the ultimate beauty that we all are; that can never, ever-ever be diminished…and even if we cannot go to sip of that elixir, mumbling and tumbling with tears, we reach out a ray of desperate light to the angels who come in the space of a breath to anoint us worthy of celestial support by our nature alone. I have always heard them in this instance, when we turn to witness the enigma of the heart’s expansion by the challenges of separation, counsel me to turn then to gratefulness, for what my partner and I have learned from each other. There is more wealth there than a hundred books and we may have more tears as we see them and us so beautifully, thankfully, but there will be something alchemical in this soul-letting—a purifying wiping away the dusts of days to show us the heroic ways we’ve struggled toward oneness in the intimacy of this tryst with a beloved. The ways we powered through when adversity assaulted, when our words could do nothing and lustful bodies too, when kisses weren’t as fragrant, when it was hard to love…and when it was hard to love sometimes we fought to find once again that ease and sweetness which was the whole reason for our togethering in the first place. And sometimes we were victorious and the embraces then were ever-beautiful, the love rising higher. We realize in awe that we were great warriors of love and the wisdom gained has shifted our present terrain. 

We change, just like the seasons, and there’s cycles to be and returning bounties of the harvests of the heart where, though something lingers to an end, a silent spring begins to start; a womb-tomb. The waters of wisdom are ever-flowing, though our pain may hide them temporarily. We can call forth then, in the throes of gratefulness, our beloved before us, vision untying strands of light from heart-to-heart while a sorrowful, spiritual song plays in the background to help us emote deeper. We hold them in a love that is unconditional, praising and thanking them for all we’ve learned, offering our tears as peace, wishing them greater love from the inspirations we’ve carefully mustered. 

The heart breaks to wake. It’s just so very true. In the throes of it you may not want to hear that but it’s the promise mothering all doubt in a playful dance of revealing. There will come a time when you somehow gather the strength to stand from the damp pillow smattered with your despair, stumble unconscious toward the door to release yourself from your crucible of initiation to taste the earth-tingled air. You walk outside and it’s raining, it’s a torrent of heavy dampness. You hold out your arms in the fullness of feeling and release howls and yells that pull ghostly clouds from your meridians, releasing burdens by the vibrational medicine. You are empty, numb, and you take a deep breath and it goes so much deeper than ever before, zinging you with vitality in an instant. Your body, leading, head given to heart, begins to shake, move, whip, rattle, roll—the magnitude of love, the beauty and the wound, hits you and there is no resistance in you to being devoured by its roar. In the death and the breaking, you’ve been made more alive, shocked by grief into a whole new state of wakefulness. Your eyes see things they didn’t before. Your heart extends wider. ‘The sweet pain of love’ murmurs. And you smile because you are the knowing. Before you realize it, you’ve begun to dance, dancing it all out, dancing it all in, becoming simply continuum. And, suddenly, out of nowhere, with no seeming linear cause-and-effect interject, from the mystery of eternity’s waving swells, the heart rejoices because you loved so hard, died so hard, hard enough to rebirth…