That's a passage I read in an issue of Parabola magazine back in 2004, an issue that focused on friendship. That winter issue was so powerful for me, chock full of empowering and uplifting messages, giving me lots to reflect on.
This passage, however, I think is one of the more powerful pieces for me because it resonates so completely with who I am. As Emerson says, it is "native of the same celestial latitude" and "repeats in its own all my experience." This is one of many ways that I experience love, this is how it can feel to me. It can be painful and interminably so. But to close the door on that pain, to medicate it and suture the wound would be to close my heart to love. It would be a hardening of the heart that would only close me off to the source. And while it hurts, while I anguish, while it sometimes feel like the very fabric of my being is unravelling in every direction, I have to continually choose to keep my heart open to it.
I've read somewhere that the ultimate nature of effort is to allow something to happen. This is completely at odds with who I am and the way I function. I want to move and do when what I need is to sit and meditate. I am impulsive and brash and passionate and dramatic. I see weakness where tenderness and vulnerability reside within me, and shy away from embracing those aspects of my personality for fear of being thought of as weak or stupid. John Keats says, "It seems to me that we should rather be the flower than the bee ... let us open our leaves like a flower and be passive and receptive..."
It seems impossible to me that I should forever be the flower, but it also seems important that I learn to be the flower at least some of the time. I can't help but feel that it's imperative to embrace that sweet wound, to make room for it in my house, and welcome it as openly as I welcome my many blessings. That when the occasion pops up that it should burst wide open, that I listen for the lessons that invariably ensue. That instead of screaming out in pain like a child waking from a nightmare, that I calmly tend the wound-- to inspect it and then provide whatever care it requires.
What a hard lesson to learn, and what a hard practice to perpetuate. To accept that life will inevitably hurt you sometimes and to remember that the pain is necessary to teach us the lessons we might otherwise never learn. That we can't always (and shouldn't always) sever the pain and simply and mindlessly medicate until we feel nothing. To train ourselves to temper our instincts with understanding. To learn that sometimes keeping that wound open might mean someone will betray the trust we give and hurt us even further. But that's just the chance we take when we decide to open ourselves to love and life-- it's a choice we make that when we welcome in the light, we also must let in the dark. And it's how we decide to deal with both that determines how we grow or heal and enjoy life.
Alan Watts writes, "A mind which will not melt-- with sorrow or love-- is a mind which will all too easily break." I think he's onto something there...
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