“You have to keep breaking your heart until it opens.” ~ Rumi*
Breaking – Brokenness can become openness.
As we approach the Christian Easter celebration, I invite you, my dear reader, no matter what your “label” – spiritual or absolutely not, to allow the message behind Easter to be yours; that of breaking, emptiness, a shattering in pieces to allow the new, the fresh, the unknown to become.
Always Needing
I have to smile when I hear myself and others do all we can to avoid discomfort. We might overeat at lunch to ensure we don’t feel the slightest pang before dinner. Some travelers micro plan every minute of a vacation, lest by some hardship they may come face to face with an annoyance (how dreadful!) that could have been averted if only things had gone as planned. I am no novice in controlling, in fact, I have a Masters’s degree.
Our thirst to be in charge, to have control, to reasonably predict the outcome of our lives at any given moment can crack our vessels and weaken our walls. Soon if we are not careful, we too may break. And then what?
Sometimes Things Break – Graphic Artwork from Original by Harmony Thiessen
The minute I heard my first love story, I started looking for you, not knowing how blind that was. Lovers don’t finally meet somewhere. They’re in each other all along. ~ Rumi
The Possibility Of Pain
Even a masochist want’s to avoid pain. To avoid the inevitable pain of life, they try to control pain. I think we all do. A broken heart is insufferable. Our fractured dreams leave us empty, aching, throbbing with anguish, or cold – like a corpse walking. Who wants that? Certainly not me.
However, despite my diligent efforts to avoid breaking (usually through controlling behaviors), pain finds me.
It’s only in the last six years that I began to see beyond the dragons, like the hideous creatures in video games I played with my son, that warn me from the Pain Chamber. Dragons represent my fear of anguish, but they don’t invite me into the salve of love. Love and pain – wholeness and breaking – joy and sorrow; I can’t have one without the other.
Breaking and Wholeness; Pushing and Pulling
These polarities are the push and pull of living. I inhale life and nourishment and vitality, I exhale exhaustion. I inhale oxygen to feed my cells, and equally as important I exhale waste products that keep my blood from toxicity. A push and pull.
Saturn’s beautiful rings, loved by stargazers in all parts of the world, exist and dazzle through push and pull.
The filling and the emptying. The wholeness and the breaking.
The Message
Easter, despite all the liturgical drama and historical reference, is a message of love spilling out; of a heart willing to be broken to create connection. The Sunday resurrection is an analogy of what happens after the pain – can we be restored, or renewed, brought “back to life” through love? Yes. Please trust me on this, yes.
In your silence may you find your own way to hear the gentle rhythm of the potter with the clay – your innermost self gently restored, moment by moment, with a sure and trustworthy hand.
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Sometimes things break
Front side
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back side
Processing Grief
Original Painting by Harmony Thiessen
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