To love is to be vulnerable...
Practicing vulnerability.
I want my heart to be able to break again.
I want my heart to be able to break again.
 clipped from www.quotedb.com"Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable." - Copy to Clipboard C.S. Lewis |
a beautiful beautiful thought. I think quite often about how my heart has been broken: the people who once loved me (or so I hoped) who now do not, the places I used to call home that I now do not, the "should've-been"/"couldve-beens" that I tell myself were mine although they were not... and thinking that way makes it harder and harder to connect again. I don't want to loose more / I've been around that block too many times already / I've given up too much to settle into something less-than-perfect now.
ReplyDeleteAll chatter. All lies. All keeping me from love.
Instead, you propose -- just embrace all the damn "heartache". All the loss -- real or not. Just love the loss, ask for more. Embrace. Live. Go for it.
Ask for the heart to be in a place where it can break again. Allow for all possibilities, allowing for joy and love as well.
Hearts were made to break. Having realized that, life was much easier.
ReplyDeleteLovely.
ReplyDeleteMakes me think of this very different but related quote from Animal Dreams, by Barbara Kingsolver - from a discussion between a doctor and his daughter. I read it 11 years ago on my first travels in the US, and think of it every so often, but I just found a long-lost notebook from that trip with this quote recorded in it. Then I read your quote. Seemed serendipitous.
"Why do you suppose the poets talk about hearts?" he asked me suddenly. "When they discuss emotional damage? The tissue of hearts is as tough as a shoe. Did you ever sew up a heart?"
I shook my head. "No, but I've watched. I know what you mean." The walls of the heart are thick and strong, and the surgeons use heavy needles. It takes a good bit of strength, but it pulls together neatly. As much as anything it's like binding a book.
"The seat of human emotion should be the liver," Doc Homer said. "That would be an appropriate metaphor: we don't hold love in our hearts, we hold it in our livers."
I understand exactly. Once in ER I saw a woman who'd been stabbed everywhere, most severely in the liver. It's an organ with the consistency of layer upon layer of wet Kleenex. Every attempt at repair just opens new holes that tear and bleed. You try to close the wound with fresh wounds, and you try and you try and you don't give up until there's nothing left."