Paulo Coelho wrote: “Words are tears that have been written down. Tears are words that need to be shed. Without them, joy loses all its brilliance and sadness has no end.”
Shakespeare wrote: “Give sorrow words; the grief that does not speak whispers the o’er-fraught heart and bids it break.”
And A.A. Milne wrote: “A quotation is a handy thing to have about, saving one the trouble of thinking for oneself.”
So I meander here through a maze of other people’s wisdom and try to find my feet in tear-formed pools of grief where others have already trod. The eyot has sent me back to the garden where I turn my reflection to the spring sun and dive into Judith Anodea’s river of words, in Eastern Body, Western Mind, which I use to irrigate the weeds that are learning to grow amongst the flowers. “Those who are idealistic about love sometimes find the greatest pain. Wide-eyed they fall, giving their utmost to the beloved. Great is their dismay, when giving all they could and valuing this love above all things, they see their lover casually mistreat what they had regarded as sacred.” Just when I thought the gardening was all done, “… a painful situation triggers wounds from previous hurts that were never healed and we feel like we are re-experiencing every hurt that has ever happened to us.” Like driving a garden fork through your foot … and not just once!
“The emptiness of abandonment may be re-experienced every time it happens in adulthood, where the loss of a loved one leaves us feeling like we’re falling apart. The body itself may reflect this collapse, with the muscles chronically undercharged, the legs weak, and the upper back hunched over as if the spine cannot quite hold itself upright.” I don’t collapse and feel like dying anymore – well, not as frequently anyway – but my body has shut down. It’s had enough and no longer even heeds the call of my inner Forrest Gump. I can no longer fight it so I dose myself up with Tryptophan and I lie on the grass and find farm animals in the clouds, wondering if perhaps the dose is too high.
“When we fall in love, we strip ourselves of defences. We open to another and to the world. We expand and grow. When we are hurt in matters of love, we are hurt in our most vulnerable, trusting aspects. The purest form of self is wounded. It no longer feels safe to be authentic. Our system – wounded at the very core – shuts down and we lose not only our lover but ourselves as well. This is the deepest loss.” Each of our friends reflects a certain aspect of ourselves; they allow the different aspects of our personalities to breathe. When we lose a friend we lose that aspect of ourselves too. “The point of grief work is to regain connection with the self inside rather than increase our attachment to what was lost.” With a lover who you connect with on a cellular level, all those things he awakens in you are lost when he leaves and this is the part we truly grieve. “If the object of our worship should leave, fall from grace, or reject us, we are devastated. To heal, we must then reconnect responsibly to the self within, seeing it as an aspect of divinity in its own right, and much in need of love and understanding.” Ultimately we can get over anyone who leaves – even when it feels like an impossible goal – but we can’t get over the missing pieces of ourselves. My deficient heart has responded to the wounds by withdrawing and I find“… distance from others and defend against closeness and the risk of getting hurt again.”
I am reminded of a quote by Rumi: “Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that have been built against it.” He also wrote, “Lovers do not finally meet somewhere, they are in each other all along.” When my heart was broken I didn’t search for love. He was already in me. But I still had to put in the time, seeking out the barriers I had built against loving him, gradually breaking them down. And opening myself up. And allowing myself to love him. But as my heart opened like a lotus flower out of the cesspool, it was plucked by the knife of abandonment.
Rollo May wrote, “To love means to open ourselves to the negative as well as the positive – to grief, sorrow and disappointment as well as to joy, fulfilment and an intensity of consciousness we did not know was possible before.” And in this heady mix of uppers and downers, and waking up in Vegas where the broken down barriers lead to love and the love leads to barriers, which get broken down to expose the love … and on and on, I suddenly sober up and see that all I’m left with is “… the hangover and the memory of love.”
But when I feel like stopping there, Brandi Carlisle’s voice strains down the headphones cord, “But these stories don’t mean anything if you’ve got no one to tell them to. It’s true, I was made for you.” and the barriers stand tall with the reminder of what an irrelevant sentiment that is when love pierced my abdomen and stuck me in a frame to display my beautiful wings; preserving me when I would far rather have died.
But, hey, “Relationship furthers the evolution of individual souls and the collective soul of our planet.” So I slurp down bowlfuls of bittersweet soup for the soul, take one for the planet, and trust that the cycle will continue, just as it should.
