heartbreak

Beauty in Broken Things

/ LaNell / 2 Comments

There is a beauty in broken things.  The Japanese call it Wabi Sabi.  I call it life.  

The imperfect nature of each of us gifts us with unique ways to see the world and express ourselves for the benefit of everyone.  When we add our uniqueness to the whole, we create openness within ourselves and within the world for even more expression, creation, and compassion.

No matter who we are or how long we live, each of us contributes to the ever-expanding consciousness where our ancestors live.  Someday, we, too, will be called ancestors.  Let us be worthy of the prayers and pleadings.  Let us pave the way for our descendants to live their own lives of free will.  

We can start this daunting task with a simple understanding.  

Understand that the shattered pieces of our broken hearts, minds, and bodies shine like prisms.  Every new crack brings a brighter light.

Our brokenness does not stop us from seeing beauty and being beauty herself.  In fact, it is the reason beauty exists and is seen at all.  Imperfections may be precisely why we see so differently than everyone else.  These are gifts that need to be shared.  

Our imperfections have the power to give us compassion for all life – if we can love this brokenness within ourselves.  Compassion that can change the world must begin within and for ourselves.  

Life on this planet is short-lived; each being is a different expression of creation and consciousness, whether a flower, a rock, a human, or another animal.  It is imperative to share your uniqueness and your way of seeing and speaking with the world.

For what other reason have you been created?

video of poem

The Two-Headed Calf

By Laura Gilpin

Tomorrow when the farm boys find this freak of nature,

They will wrap his body in newspaper and carry him to the museum.

But tonight he is alive and in the north field with his mother.

It is a perfect summer evening: the moon rising over the orchard,

The wind in the grass.

And as he stares into the sky,

There are twice as many stars as usual.

A note to readers: I have increasingly been writing about consciousness, cosmos, and spirituality. For that reason, I have a new blog called anahatanada.online. If that is of interest to you, please check it out.

With gratitude,

LaNell

Blessing for the Brokenhearted

/ LaNell / Leave a comment

What if I told you that by avoiding going deep and walking through the darkness of heartbreak, you only take yourself further and further away from who you truly are.

Many of us, if not most of us, do not believe we can carry that kind of pain for very long. We avoid feeling it and skim along the surface of the heartbreak, never taking a deep dive.

We keep afloat with distractions, self-medication, overwork, anything else but feeling.

These dark times, when we sink into grief and let it hold us like a heavy blanket, are the times that give birth to a new way of being in the world. That is that fertile soil from which we emerge with a tender yet strong heart, a heart that, despite the painful memories, wants to give and receive even more. A heart that knows how to carry grief and love together.

The only way out is through. And without that deep dive, we never know who we could become on the other side.

As Henry David Thoreau stated, “There is no remedy for love but to love more.”

Below is a Blessing for the Brokenhearted. I hope it gives you comfort.

A poem by Jan Richardson @ www.paintedprayerbook.com

BLESSING FOR THE BROKENHEARTED

Let us agree
for now
that we will not say
the breaking
makes us stronger
or that it is better
to have this pain
than to have done
without this love.

Let us promise
we will not
tell ourselves
time will heal
the wound,
when every day
our waking
opens it anew.

Perhaps for now
it can be enough
to simply marvel
at the mystery
of how a heart
so broken
can go on beating,
as if it were made
for precisely this—

as if it knows
the only cure for love
is more of it,

as if it sees
the heart’s sole remedy
for breaking
is to love still,

as if it trusts
that its own
persistent pulse
is the rhythm
of a blessing
we cannot
begin to fathom
but will save us
nonetheless.

—Jan Richardson

Love After Love

/ LaNell / Leave a comment

The weight of heartbreak and loss can envelop us in what feels like darkness so deep and wide, it is unimaginable to think of receiving love from another again. However, the most neglected and estranged person we encounter in our lives is oftentimes ourselves.

It is possible to love ourselves again, or for the first time. This poem by Derek Walcott tells us to discard the letters and preconceived images we have of ourselves that were borne out of disappointment and to love those parts of ourselves we have neglected. Fall in love with that stranger.

Love After Love

by Derek Walcott

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.