How to look after a heart

Hello <3

I’m back from Paris and grieving my fake French life, where I was in a suspension of disbelief that living would go on that way forever. These periods of time in life are precious! If you get them, enjoy them without overthinking! As our girl Mary Oliver says, joy is not meant to be a crumb.

While I was there, I saw Cathy de Monchaux's exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo called Studio, wounds and battles. Desire is the reiteration of hope. I stood in front of the above heart-shaped piece for about 20 minutes, deeply moved and unable to feel anything else in the room.

On the exhibition card, de Monchaux talks about her obsession with learning to make things with her hands. She talks about how she started teaching herself various practical skills to feel more valuable to the world and be more physically in touch with herself and her surroundings. This heart, to me, was a testament to her efforts. To what it takes to tend to things with care.

As soon as I saw it, I was like, Oh, yeah, THAT’S what a heart is. Its steely exterior, hand-bound at the edges, its pillowy insides. At its centre is a metal pronged hinge, which, if you’ve ever been heartbroken, you’ll be familiar with the way it can heave shut at any moment. Rust over. Get janky if you don’t look after it. If you’re alive, you know how much it takes to keep that machine soft and intact day in, day out.

That red velvet. That brass exterior. The way it makes you want to protect it. The way it makes you want to keep the soft insides plush and soft and more than just alive — living.

The way it makes you want to put the heart on display so everyone can see it, but keep it safe so only the people who understand can touch it. The way it makes you think there might be someone out there with the same shaped space. The way it makes you feel less alone.

Years ago, a very bad thing happened to me, and it has taken me a long time to get over it. It’s been difficult and at a lot of times lonely. And it’s very easy in these moments to forget how to be soft and believe in the ways life can be soft back. Your brain rejects this logic, and your body doesn’t want to believe it. It wants to pull that brass clamp shut and keep the light out for good because that’s mathematically safer than letting anything in.

I remember sitting in my therapist’s office while she explained this to me, drawing on a piece of paper the body’s response to pain, to trauma out of our control, and that the only way to properly move through it was to keep your heart as open as possible. “That’s so annoying,” I said. I was crying but also trying to smile because I wanted her to think I was smart and amenable to her wisdom, and she laughed in that annoying way when you know someone who knows what they’re talking about is right.

Whenever things have become difficult since that session (often), I imagine being back in that warm room as the Auckland sun went down in the window behind us, and my therapist throwing her shoulders back, puffing out her chest like a bird to exaggerate the act of loving. Yes, romantic loving, yes, loving your family and your friends and to whatever extent possible, your colleagues, your landlord, your mechanic.

But something greater, too. Loving also being about recognising that vulnerable red plush centre of everything, and everyone, and being able to go on believing that it is a regenerative force, able to recreate itself all over again, and that to shut it out completely is to deny yourself of all the ways it can transform everything around it. It takes time. It takes maintenance. I wish there were other ways. But this could be why it’s called an art in the first place.

xo

In the spirit of staying soft, here are a few gentle things on my radar atm:

Adored, in awe, playing this System Olympia cover of Mazzy Star on repeat:

For my new book club. Just started. It’s teethy. Will report back.

An expensive oil, sue me. It makes you smell like a soft witch, aka poetry.

For God's sake, can someone recommend a series I can sink my teeth into? Extra points if you set me up with a VPN. Then I might just fall in love with you.

Wishes,
Bel
xo