Do you ever feel like no matter how hard you try, you will never have what your heart truly desires? And that it would be better to just give up on those things because your heart is broken and will never really be healed?I had an experience today about this subject. It's bitterly cold here in Western Montana, but I decided to go for a hike anyway, because I could feel myself sinking into a depression and I knew exercise would make me feel better. As I was coming down the hill at the end of the hike, I was feeling deep sorrow; sorrow about not being loved, sorrow about not ever having a childhood, but mostly sorrow about never being loved the way I've wanted to be loved. My heart felt broken, and I felt a vast, empty weight press down on me.
Just at that moment, the clock tower on campus struck 5:00PM and the bitter wind whipped up and rattled through the dead leaves still on the trees. It was the most mournful, sorrowful, yet somehow darkly beautiful moment. For that moment, I felt like a ghost walking the hillside, that the wind was blowing through me instead of around me. It was a beautiful connection with my lost inner child. Fragments of words started forming in my mind, and this poem was what came out:
Giving up on your dreams
It's not as easy as it seems
Broken splinters of your glass heart
Trapped inside, everywhere, nowhere and nothing
Squeezed, suffocated, smothered to death in a soundless scream
That has no voice
And no choice
The emptiness that has no form. The heartbreak that has no apparent cause. The loneliness and isolation that persist despite friends, family, God, and pets. The hopelessness that is everywhere, inside everything, and yet cannot be described or defined. The world's broken heart beneath its cheerful, smiling face.
I think Morpheus says it best when speaking to Neo in The Matrix:
"What you know you can't explain, but you feel it. You've felt it your entire life, that there's something wrong with the world. You don't know what it is, but it's there, like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad."
The act of trying to get what my heart really desires makes me insane. To the extent that I give up trying, I become sane.
ReplyDeleteMy heart has been completely broken by letting go of what I want. Over and over. However, in doing this it becomes clear that my heart is like a super-charged cat. It has way more than nine lives.