When your heart breaks you have two choices. You can grieve and mourn and let it stay supple. You can hold it gently so that you keep it open to healing and betterment.
Or, you can bury it.
You can “Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries”, C.S. Lewis says. You can “avoid all entanglements”. You can shove it down into the airless dark of safety, simplicity, and convenience. But when you do, it changes. “[I]t will become unbreakable, impenetrable, and [ultimately] irredeemable.” It will atrophy without movement and become useless.
I built routines and rituals. Praised them. Defended them. Used them to curate an entire way of living. Under the guise of self-care and protection. Under the banner of devotion and acceptance. I told myself I was building a cloister. A hermitage. A church. A monastery. A temple. But really I was building a casket. They kept me creative and productive and efficient, yes. But they also sealed me off from ever having to feel the present.
Now I’m in the uncomfortable work of unbuilding it. Bit by bit. Board by board. Slowly prying the nails from my own coffin. I’m lost and scared. Overwhelmed and angst-ridden. Hoping that when the lid comes off and the light enters, there’s still enough left to come alive again.
May you hold your heart gently enough to keep it open.
May you commit yourself to the hard work of staying alive and unburied.
May the light, when it comes, find you ready to receive it.
In case no one’s told you today, I love you with all my everything.
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