Breaking Open, Śiva Style
"It is only through letting our heart break that we discover something unexpected: the heart cannot actually break, it can only break open."
These magical healing words of John Welwood are my mantra today. Apparently, I keep my internal bricklayer striving to keep it together, keep it together, keep it together, like that earnest, third little piggy, and, "Whooooosh!", the house is blown down again.
It's not such a calamity as all that, but the life I've chosen keeps allowing me to unfasten my seat belt, and not just fly free, but create the adventure I seek. Sometimes this feels a bit like a bomb has cleared the landscape, the brick facade destroyed because of Śiva's order, but when I rub the dust from my eyes it's just Alder pollen, and the only destruction is that of stale ideas.
Between my human brain's negativity bias, this nervous system that obeys every imagined threat, Patriarchy, and a Capitalist system of ever-hungrier ghosts, I got circuited to participate in lifestyles that just don't fit anymore. They are fear-based and I hereby withdraw my support for them.
I want to embody big, love-centered philosophies, like this:
“When the heart breaks open, it marks the beginning of a real love affair with this world. It is a broken-hearted love affair, rather than the conventional kind based on hope and expectation. Only in this fearless love that can respond to life’s pain as well as its beauty can we be of real help to ourselves or anyone else in this difficult age. The broken-hearted warrior is an essential archetype for our time.”
This is not a photograph.
It is a painting, by Evelyn Woods.
When I stand before her paintings, I feel the patience, the reverence, the throwing off-of-what-I-thought-was-there, the breaking open, so she could bring these images to us.
I love the stark, simple backdrops she places behind her work, so we can see these beloveds without distraction.
And what about this lovely piece from 2500 BC? What cultural shackles were shirked so this universal image of hope and worry could be cast, and remain intact, all these millennia? Thank you, brave ones, patient ones, who remind us to study ourselves, ditch what we’ve knowingly or unknowingly accepted, and listen for the new, the authentic now.
I started this blog today, thinking I would explore ideas about community and how this is all transforming for me. Of course I am relieved by the artists, they who dare to be like children in listening for the inner voices. Those who then get to live like 20-somethings, with nothing to lose and all the universes laid out like a great buffet - take what you like!
My ideas are still forming, as I’m still in the dust-settling phases of communities leaving my life. I am being broken open, and just getting comfortable with having all my bits dislodged from their orderly rows. It’s not chaos, but dis-order, which is its own order. Form and formlessness, perhaps? Something like the big cosmic soup, from which the next ladle has not yet been drawn.