My mother came back from a walk last week with a beautiful photo of a heart shape she had seen in the creek. She had tears in her eyes and her voice was wobbly with pain. “This is how I feel right now,” she said. “My heart is underwater. There is just too much.”
So many of us feel this way. Our hearts are underwater. There is too much happening, too fast, for us to be able to process it all. We feel like we are drowning. Our hearts are underwater.
May we know that our pain is the expression of our love. It is the expression of our interconnectedness with all that is. Our pain and grief and rage are the natural outpourings of huge hearts, full of love.
A teacher once reminded me that the heart is a very strong muscle. The more we exercise it, the stronger it gets. So let us weep when we must. Let us weep and rail and pound our pillows, and let the salty tears wash us clean. And then let us pick up our strong and beautiful hearts and take them out into the world to keep loving.
Photo by Nancy Kubik