Break Your Heart Open
I tell you this to break your heart, by which I mean only that it break open and never close again to the rest of the world.
- Mary Oliver
I love beautiful things…
Wildflowers on the side of a country road, the long grass undulating in the breeze, trees in the distance - hazy and humid.
The way summer air flows in through an open car window, the way it plays in your hair, and brushes your cheek.
And for a moment, you close your eyes and you are one with EVERYTHING.
One breath. One heartbeat.
I would chase that feeling until my dying day if the world didn’t demand so much of me.
I’m so productive, they say, as if that’s a good thing.
Well, good for them - but what about me?
But here’s the hard truth about beautiful things: even when they wake you up, and make you feel more alive than you have ever felt…
they can still break your heart.
And I don’t mean that pessimistically. There is something sacred about having something to lose.
But you see, among those beautiful wildflowers you are breathing in, there’s also a deer with a twisted neck, lost and forgotten on the side of the road.
Sometimes the pain of this world is too much for me, and I can feel myself start to flinch.
But I don’t want to look away because that deer’s life was as exquisitely beautiful as all the wildflowers it lays among.
Beauty and pain: we can’t separate them out.
But would we want to?
Isn’t one just a doorway to the other?
The pain deepens the beauty, the way shadows bring out the light.
And beauty - well, it opens our hearts so that everything can walk in with it.
An open heart has no walls. It’s risky. It’s hard.
And there are no guarantees.
But I don’t want to stop looking for the wildflowers,
even though they have the power to break my heart.
I’m still going to watch for them, and love them,
and when they ruin me, I’ll dab the tears away.
Writing Prompt:
Write about something that took your breath away - a moment of beauty that cracked you open. What did it awaken? What did it cost you to feel it fully?
