heartbreak, loss, and letting go

 

 

 

 

Heartbreak begins the moment we are asked to let go but cannot, in other words, it colours and inhabits and magnifies each and every day; heartbreak is not a visitation, but a path that human beings follow through even the most average life. Heartbreak is an indication of our sincerity: in love relationship, in a life's work, in trying to learn a musical instrument, in the attempt to shape a better more generous self. Heartbreak is the beautifully helpless side of love and affection and is just as much an essence and emblem of care as the spiritual athlete's quick but abstract ability to let go. Heartbreak has its own way of inhabiting time and its own beautiful and trying patience in coming and going.

Heartbreak is how we mature; yet we use the word heartbreak as if it only occurs when things have gone wrong: an unrequited love, a shattered dream, a child lost before their time. Heartbreak, we hope, is something we hope we can avoid; something to guard against, a chasm to be carefully looked for and then walked around; the hope is to find a way to place our feet where the elemental forces of life will keep us in the manner to which we want to be accustomed and which will keep us from the losses that all other human beings have experienced without exception since the beginning of conscious time. But heartbreak may be the very essence of being human, of being on the journey from here to there, and of coming to care deeply for what we find along the way.

Our hope to circumvent heartbreak in adulthood is beautifully and ironically child-like; heartbreak is as inescapable and inevitable as breathing, a part and parcel of every path, asking its due in every sincere course an individual takes, it may be that there may be not only no real life without the raw revelation of heartbreak, but no single path we can take within a life that will allow us to escape without having that imaginative organ we call the heart broken by what it holds and then has to let go.

In a sobering physical sense, every heart does eventually break, as the precipitating reason for death or because the rest of the body has given up before it and can no longer sustain its steady beat, but hearts also break in an imaginative and psychological sense: there is almost no path a human being can follow that does not lead to heartbreak. A marriage, a committed vow to another, even in the most settled, loving relationship, will always break our hearts at one time or another; a successful marriage has often had its heart broken many times just in order for the couple to stay together; parenthood, no matter the sincerity of our love for a child, will always break the mold of our motherly or fatherly hopes, a good work seriously taken, will often take everything we have and still leave us wanting; and finally even the most self compassionate, self examination should, if we are sincere, lead eventually to existential disappointment.

Realizing its inescapable nature, we can see heartbreak not as the end of the road or the cessation of hope but as the close embrace of the essence of what we have wanted or are about to lose. It is the hidden DNA of our relationship with life, outlining outer forms even when we do not feel it by the intimate physical experience generated by it absence; it can also ground us truly in whatever grief we are experiencing, set us to planting a seed with what we have left or appreciate what we have built even as we stand in its ruins.

If heartbreak is inevitable and inescapable, it might be asking us to look for it and make friends with it, to see it as our constant and instructive companion, and perhaps, in the depth of its impact as well as in its hindsight, and even, its own reward. Heartbreak asks us not to look for an alternative path, because there is no alternative path. It is an introduction to what we love and have loved, an inescapable and often beautiful question, something and someone that has been with us all along, asking us to be ready for the ultimate letting go.





David Whyte

from Consolations: The Solace, 

Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words

 

 

 

not lose myself

 

 

 

 

 

 When I am not present to myself, 

then I am only aware of that half of me, 

that mode of my being which turns outward to created things.

And then it is possible for me to lose myself among them. 

Then I no longer feel the deep secret pull of the gravitation of love

 which draws my inward self toward God.

My will and my intelligence lose their command of the other faculties. 

My senses, my imagination, my emotions, scatter to pursue

 their various quarries all over the face of the earth.

Recollection brings them home. It brings the outward self into line 

with the inward spirit, and makes my whole being answer the deep

 pull of love that reaches down into the mystery of God.

 

 In order to be recollected in action, 

I must not lose myself in action.

In order to keep acting,

I must not lose myself in recollection.

 

 

 

 

~ Thomas Merton

 from No Man is an Island

 with thanks to Love is a Place

 

the hidden music

 

 

 

 

 

 My heart, sit only with those
who know and understand you.

Sit only under a tree
that is full of blossoms.

In the bazaar of herbs and potions
don't wander aimlessly,
find the shop with a potion that is sweet.

If you don't have a measure
people will rob you in no time.

You will take counterfeit coins
thinking they are real.

Don't fill your bowl with food from
every boiling pot you see.

Not every joke is humorous, so don't search
for meaning where there isn't one.

Not every eye can see,
not every sea is full of pearls.

My heart, sing the song of longing,
like nightingale.

The sound of your voice casts a spell
on every stone, on every thorn.

First, lay down your head,
then one by one
let go of all distractions.

Embrace the light and let it guide you
beyond the winds of desire.

There you will find a spring and
nourished by its sweet waters
like a tree you will bear fruit forever.

 

 

 

 

 ~ Rumi

translation by Maryam Mafi 

and Azima Melita Kolin

art by Tovit Basirtman

 

 

support

 

 

 

 

 

 

Lionesses baby-sit for one another just as house cats sometimes do. . . . 

Elephants appear to make allowances for other members of their herd. 

One African herd always traveled slowly because one of its members 

had never fully recovered from a broken leg suffered as a calf. 

 

A park warden reported coming across a herd with a female 

carrying a small calf several days dead, which she placed on the ground

 whenever she ate or drank: she traveled very slowly and 

the rest of the elephants waited for her. . . . 

 

There appears to be so little survival value in the behavior of this herd,

 that perhaps one has to believe that they behaved this way 

just because they loved their grieving friend who loved her dead baby, 

and wanted to support her.

 

 

 

 

 

~ Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson and Susan McCarthy

from When Elephants Weep: The Emotional Lives of Animals

 

 

 

one light

‘I’ and ‘you’ are but the lattices,

in the niches of a lamp,

through which the One Light shines.

‘I’ and ‘you’ are the veil

between heaven and earth;

lift this veil and you will see

no longer the bonds of sects and creeds.

When ‘I’ and ‘you’ do not exist,

what is mosque, what is synagogue?

What is the Temple of Fire?

~ Mahmud Shabistari

Mahmud Shabistari was one of Sufi’s greatest poets of the 14th Century. Like Rumi, Shabistari lived in turbulent times. This period was often fraught with dangers, in particular the Mongol invasions brought much devastation. However Shabistari was able to write much poetry and synthesise much of the Sufi wisdom. He had a style similar to Ibn Arabi and expressed Sufi philosophy in a moving and simple language. As David Fieldler says of Shabistari

“ Shabistari possessed a unique genius for summarizing the profound and often complex teachings of Sufism in a beautiful, aphoristic, and concise fashion, which often leaves the reader speechless when the deeper meanings of his verse are grasped. “

The Secret Rose Garden by Shabistari Shabistari (1317 A.D.) must be reckoned among the greatest mystical poetry of any time or land. Treating such themes as the Self and the One, The Spiritual Journey, Time and this Dream-World, and the ecstasy of Divine Inebriation, Shabistari’s work is a perennial witness to the capabilities and destiny of humanity. Stressing the One Light that exists at the heart of all religious traditions, Shabistari's work is one of the clearest and most concise guides to the inner meaning of Sufism, and offers a stunningly direct exposition of Sufi mystical thought in poetic form.

~ Comments from Poet Seers

home

Whether drifting through life on a boat or 

climbing toward old age leading a horse, 

each day is a journey and the journey itself is home. 

~ Basho

steps

Like ev'ry flower wilts, like youth is fading

and turns to age, so also one's achieving:

Each virtue and each wisdom needs parading

in one's own time, and must not last forever.

The heart must be, at each new call for leaving,

prepared to part and start without the tragic,

without the grief - with courage to endeavor

a novel bond, a disparate connection:

for each beginning bears a special magic

that nurtures living and bestows protection.

 

We'll walk from space to space in glad progression

and should not cling to one as homestead for us.

The cosmic spirit will not bind nor bore us;

it lifts and widens us in ev'ry session:

for hardly set in one of life's expanses

we make it home, and apathy commences.

But only he, who travels and takes chances,

can break the habits' paralyzing stances.

 

It even may be that the last of hours

will make us once again a youthful lover:

The call of life to us forever flowers...

Anon, my heart! Do part and do recover!

~ Hermann Hesse

translated by Walter A. Aue

births

 

 

 

 

 

We will never have any memory of dying.

We were so patient
about our being,
noting down
numbers, days,
years and months,
hair, and the mouths we kiss,
and that moment of dying
we let pass without a note—
we leave it to others as memory,
or we leave it simply to water,
to water, to air, to time.
Nor do we even keep
the memory of being born,
although to come into being was tumultuous and new;
and now you don’t remember a single detail
and haven’t kept even a trace
of your first light.

It’s well known that we are born.

It’s well known that in the room
or in the wood
or in the shelter in the fishermen’s quarter
or in the rustling canefields
there is a quite unusual silence,
a grave and wooden moment as
a woman prepares to give birth.

It’s well known that we were all born.

But of that abrupt translation
from not being to existing, to having hands,
to seeing, to having eyes,
to eating and weeping and overflowing
and loving and loving and suffering and suffering,
of that transition, that quivering
of an electric presence, raising up
one body more, like a living cup,
and of that woman left empty,
the mother who is left there in her blood
and her lacerated fullness,
and its end and its beginning, and disorder
tumbling the pulse, the floor, the covers
till everything comes together and adds
one knot more to the thread of life,
nothing, nothing remains in your memory
of the savage sea which summoned up a wave
and plucked a shrouded apple from the tree.

The only thing you remember is your life. 

~  Pablo Neruda

from Plenos Poderes (Fully Empowered)

 art by Jackie Traverse

 with thanks to whiskey river

 

 

 

no strangers

 

 

 

 


under cherry blossoms’ shade
even those whom we don’t know
are not strangers 

 

 

 

~ Issa Kobayashi 

 

 

 

relatedness

 

 

 

 

 

 In reality there is a single integral community of the Earth 

that includes all its component members 

whether human or other than human.

 

 In this community every being has its own role to fulfill, 

its own dignity, its inner spontaneity. Every being has its own voice. 

Every being declares itself to the entire universe. 

Every being enters into communion with other beings. 

 

This capacity for relatedness, for presence to other beings,

 for spontaneity in action, is a capacity possessed by every mode of being

 throughout the entire universe.

 

 

 

~ Thomas Berry

 photo by Edward Sheriff Curtis

 

 

desire the truth?

 

 

 

We are all convinced that we desire the truth above all.

Nothing strange about this. It is natural to man, an intelligent being, 

to desire the truth.

 

 (I still dare to speak of man as "an intelligent being"!)

But actually, what we desire is not "the truth" so much as "to be in the right."

To seek the pure truth for its own sake may be natural to us,

 but we are not able to act always in this respect according to our nature.

What we seek is not the pure truth, but the partial truth that justifies our prejudices,

 our limitations, our selfishness. This is not "the truth." 

It is only an argument strong enough to prove us "right."
And usually our desire to be right is correlative to our conviction

 that somebody else (perhaps everybody else) is wrong.

Why do we want to prove them wrong?

Because we need them to be wrong. For if they are wrong, 

and we are right, then our untruth becomes truth: 

our selfishness becomes justice and virtue: 

our cruelty and lust cannot be fairly condemned.

We can rest secure in the fiction we have determined to embrace as "truth."

What we desire is not the truth, but rather that our lie should be proved "right,"

 and our iniquity be vindicated as "just."

No wonder we hate. No wonder we are violent. 

No wonder we exhaust ourselves in preparing for war!

And in doing so, of course, we offer the enemy another reason to believe

 that he is right, that he must arm, that he must get ready to destroy us.

Our own lie provides the foundation of truth on which he erects his own lie,

 and the two lies together react to produce hatred, murder, disaster.

~ Thomas Merton, 

from Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander

 with thanks to brainpickings

 

 

 

the swarming throng of "I"

 

 

 

 

 

 

The secret teachings lead the pupil further. 

They teach him to look, with the same serene indifference, 

at the incessant working of his mind and the physical activity 

displayed by the body. 

 

He ought to succeed in understanding, in noting that nothing

 of all that is from him, is him. 

He, physically and mentally,

 is a multitude of others.

This "multitude of others" includes the material elements—

the ground, one might say—which he owes to his heredity,

 his atavism, then those which he has ingested, which he has inhaled 

from before his birth, by the help of which his body was formed, 

and which, assimilated by him, have become, with the complex forces 

inherent in them, constituent parts of his being.

On the mental plane, this "multitude of others" includes many beings

 who are his contemporaries: people he consorts with, with whom he chats, 

whose actions he watches. 

 

Thus a continual inhibition is at work while the individual absorbs

 a part of the various energies given off by those with whom he is in contact, 

and these incongruous energies, installing themselves in that which

 he considers his "I", 

form there a swarming throng.

~ Alexandra David-Néel and Lama Yongten
frjom The Secret Oral Teachings

 in Tibetan Buddhist Sects

 

art from A detail from the Sea Journey: 

People Without Borders by Erub/Lifou 

Project, commissioned for APT9.

 

 with thanks to Love is a Place

 

 

 

 

painting tigers

 

 

 

 

brokenness and vulnerability

 

 

 

  brokenness and weakness 

also mysteriously pull us out of ourselves. 

We feel them both together.

Only vulnerability forces us beyond ourselves. 

Whenever we see true pain, most of us are drawn out

 of our own preoccupations and want to take away the pain. 

 

For example, when we rush toward a hurting child, 

 we want to take the suffering in our arms. 

That’s why so many saints wanted to get near suffering—

because as they said again and again, 

 it “saved” them from their smaller untrue self.(1)



I think grief puts us in touch with our vulnerabilities.

 I think the feeling of grief lets us know the power of wounds

 to shape our stories. I think it lets us know how capable we are

 of having our hearts broken and our feelings hurt. 

 

I think it lets us know the link that we each have because we’re human.

 Because we’re human, we hurt. Because we’re human, we have tears to cry.

 Because we’re human, our hearts are broken. Because we’re human,

 we understand that loss is a universal language. Everybody grieves.

 All of humanity grieves. All of us have setbacks, broken dreams.

 All of us have broken relationships or unrealized possibilities. 

All of us have bodies that just don’t do what they used to do.

 Though grief is personal, every person grieves.(2)

 

 

 

 

 ~ Richard Rohr(1) 

and Dr. Jacqui Lewis(2)

 

 

 

the world rolls right on

 

 

 

 

 

 

mountain sounds carry a chill wisdom
an upwelling spring whispers subtle tales
pine breezes stir the fire beneath my tea
bamboo shadows soak deep into my robe

I grind my ink: clouds scraping across the crags
copy out a verse: birds settling on branches
as the world rolls right on by
its every turn tracing out non-action

 

 

 

 

 

~ Shih Shu 

English version by James H. Sanford

from  The Clouds Should Know Me By Now: 

Buddhist Poet Monks of China

 Edited by Red Pine 

with thanks to Poetry Chaikhana