Let’s all take a deep collective breath and see if we can settle and center into a kind of balance where we can sense our togetherness. We are here. Can you feel it? Let’s dive deeply into our hearts. If you go there energetically, you’ll find some jagged edges, crinkled ends, dog-eared pages, little chips missing, slivers and shards lying around, big aches here and small aches there, some weariness, and a whole lot of… authenticity.
The world is so cynical and so self-centered that a profit driven suffocation or closing in on the human heart, makes it hard to breathe. So let’s just FEEL together. BREATHE together.
Feel. Breathe.
The tattered human heart is one that has truly FELT. It knows empathy and through empathy, it knows another as itself. And by feeling in your body and embracing the heaviness, the fear, the brokenness, you find an internal transformation taking place. Because you can FEEL, things become more personal. The pain is more personal. The sorrow is more personal. The world is more personal…
We can’t save a world and we won’t even be interested if it isn’t personal.
A world that has become personal is a world that we find worthy of caring for, being stewards of, embracing and changing and insisting that others feel that same deep responsibility too. Indifference doesn’t serve the world, or the children, or the future.
So, tenderly embrace your broken heart. And embrace every old breaking and every new one. Let it mold you into an authentic, loving and tender being. That is the purpose of the heart breaking. It’s not just to build character although it certainly does that. It is to enlarge its capability to love and embrace, to stretch its compassionate muscle, to expand its reach rather than collapse it or contract back into a lonely self. Your heart must be big if we are to truly change the world. Big enough to wrap around it.
It also must be tattered and weary and worn for that is the heart that feels compassion; it has witnessed all things, been all things, embraced all things and now recognizes its family– and that’s everybody.
This big heart can care for the safety of children and cherish them as new and precious beings come here with a purpose and subject to molding by their environment. If your heart is hurt and tattered and weary the world is not an indifferent place; it is a beautiful place.
A compassionate place.
You won’t change or save a world you don’t care about. You won’t feel or create one human family without compassion.
It really is all for love.
A new kind.
Thank you Poet Gerri Stone
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Here is the title poem from my book, Freeing the Heart
FREEING THE HEART
Michael tore a hole through the
middle of our being, left us a raw
quivering mass of pure hurt.
We are seized up with
grief, deep, intense.
Can’t stop our tears.
This is silenced grief that has
finally been given voice.
And these tears, these sobs
aren’t just for you, Michael.
They are for all the
indignities
humiliations
beat-downs
across time ungrieved.
Unfinished.
Every minute of every day somewhere
in this world someone is watching a
Michael Jackson video, listening to one
of his songs on an I-pod, blasting it in a car.
And whenever his music plays a grief
arises. Free floating grief searching for
a heart to nest in. Pain trapped in the
stomach, eyes, throat.
And we in our ignorance think this pain is
surely here to destroy us.
But it is not.
It is Michael at work, removing the
raggedy burned-out thing we’ve been
carrying around in our chest all these years,
leaving in its place our real hearts.
Awakening us from our heartless trance.
(c) 2010 Gerri Stone
Thank you Gerri on so many levels. Namaste` ~B
Wonderful post! ^^ And very moving poem Gerri!
“The tattered human heart is one that has truly FELT. It knows empathy and through empathy, it knows another as itself.”
This is so true and beautiful! Thank you for voicing what I’ve been feeling for so long! 🙂
Thank you for this wonderful post Rev. Barbara. It is good that we settle in and just be. So many people are feeling so many emotions. Sometimes it becomes almost overwhelming. Taking a step back at times is a necessity to keep us sane. I had to do that quite a bit lately; however, I don’t do it too long. I don’t want to run away from the emotions. I know I have to feel them to get through to the other side. To feel the pain and grief truly helps us be more compassionate. Thank you Gerri for the beautiful poems. I have your book. Thank you for sharing your gift.
Indeed, Kim, we need to FEEL; the intellect cannot make the proper connections. Emotions will. Mind in place of heart doesn’t work anymore. The reason we have a crisis on this planet is because of the disconnect with self, with others, with culture, and with the stewardship of our planet. We have cut ourselves off from feeling our feelings. We use drugs, alcohol, food, sex, video games, personal devices, texting, and TV to anesthetize ourselves to feelings.
Someone in my writer’s group asked last night: “Do you think people watch reality shows so that they can watch others feel for them so they don’t have to feel for themselves?” That gave me chills because she makes a point.
We cannot THINK the problems of the world away. We have to FEEL the empathy and compassion that are required to connect and build community. The shift to empathy and compassion comes from feeling the pain– ours, others and the world’s. (Breaking the heart to soften it.) Mind doesn’t feel empathy and compassion. Heart does. Love comes not from the mind but from the heart. It really is all for Love.
Thank you so much Rev. B for the post and all that you do. We all do need to breathe and let this all out. I think we are all here because with all that is being said we are taking things personally, we are all feeling the pain. I agree we need to breathe. It’s hard:
It’s no mistake you’re here. And it’s no mistake that Michael Jackson was here, was who he was, gathered so many followers (fans) around the world and that they are loyal to him. He intended to change the world and knew he couldn’t do that alone so he recruited millions to help. Studies show that an idea can spread and become viral quickly and the ratio to create critical mass and change this planet’s consciousness from indifference/divisiveness to compassion/community is the square root of 1% of the population. There are enough Michael Jackson fans alone to do it should they ever decide to become one in spirit and mission. There are some folks deliberately working toward critical mass as we speak. I know 3 of them and studied with one of them personally.
Let me know when you’re all ready.
Dear All,
There is such inspiration on this page! Thank you those whose work is shown here.
Michael, Shining Star. A man who, despite being crushed at every turn, was somehow able to keep unconditional love for mankind overflowing from his being. It is there in his face, his loving words and his dance with the Universe. His only motive to breakthrough our miserable condition and discover what lay beneath. We were slow to learn, but his passing accomplished this in one Holy Instant.
Tattered, weary and worn? Yes! But still determined to make a difference. Foremost in my awareness is the drive to transcend all negativity and see the world as it Will be. Perhaps we are all working towards critical mass, consciously or not?
Namaste,
Lynaire
Indeed. Wouldn’t it be nice though, to move it along?
Heavens! YES! And that is my sole intention at this moment in time, vertically and prayerfully. Lynaire
I know that cuzzie. And I mean that in every way you read it at this moment in time. The world doesn’t always recognize its treasures. No matter; they are still incalculable. Namaste`
Lynaire said, “A man who, despite being crushed at every turn, was somehow able to keep unconditional love for mankind overflowing from his being.” If only we could all understand that, because once again is he not showing us the more conscious and EFFECTIVE way of behaving through all of this?
Darkness has so much “power” in our world because we BELIEVE that it has. When you walk into a dark room and flip on the Light, what INSTANTLY happens to the dark? Do you have to stand there and become crushed as you argue with it to go away?
Michael was Michael because he UNDERSTOOD FULLY WHAT WAS CONTAINED WITHIN HIM. Maybe we should begin to do the same.
Indeed. If a biological being understood both its core and its point of origin as Divine Being, embraced and embodied that understanding and lived a life from that place, how would that one behave? What could or would such a one accomplish? How would that being behave? How would such a one treat others of its kind, its culture and community? Its planet?
If the one became many… IMAGINE.
I love Poet Gerri’s poem. Thanks for sharing it. The more I study Michael’s life, the more I see him expressed so beautifully in this quote, “We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.” *
Michael Jackson embodied this philosophy:
“Love alone is capable of uniting living beings in such a way as to complete and fulfill them, for it alone takes them and joins them by what is deepest in themselves”. *
I couldn’t say it better and I’m sure you agree.
We all must walk our own path in life. No one else can do it for us but thankfully, there are many who are there to cross our paths at the right time. My prayers are that this intertwining gains power expoentially and these paths connect with an ever-increasing pace. The Earth is crying, its shores are weeping….just as Michael impassoned in his masterpiece, Earth Song. Whenever we are given an opportunity, no matter how small or insignificant we may deem it, we must reach out and touch in love.
We must.
Thank you, Reverend Barbara. You are salt and light.
* Teilhard de Charin (French Geologist; Priest; Philospher and Mystic – 1881 – 1955)
I remember the first time I read Gerri’s poem, my heart broke open a little further, with a cry of understanding that I wasn’t alone in what I was experiencing, that others were going through the same thing, seeing and understanding the same things.
Gerri, your poem still flutters wings in my heart– both of them do. And every single word on this entry climbed inside me and echoed through me, touching the raw places that have been making me desperate of late. I couldn’t thank you enough, Reverend Barbara, for the reminder that this pain that engulfs me is a USEFUL pain, a necessary one. I panic sometimes because it’s overwhelming; I read too many heart-breaking stories of how we’re failing each other in the world, failing other species, failing our planet, and I want to curl up and stop feeling..but that seems to be precisely when an even bigger wave engulfs me.
I know I’ve asked this question before– how do we move from feeling, from having open, throbbing, living hearts, awash with so much pain and compassion, to action? I keep telling myself to wait, to allow the process, and the moment will come when I can see a path forward. But sometimes I want to explode with the waiting, and sometimes I just think I’m failing miserably. What good is it to hear the call, and not act upon it? I desperately want to feel the impulse of action, yet, have no idea what to do with myself, how to change my life, how to give back the everything that I want to give back to the world and make it a better in some small way. I need someone to lead the way– but somewhere inside me a voice is already telling me it has to be me…Nonetheless I am enamoured with how perfectly timely your posts always are for me, Reverend Barbara– always reminding me that this is a path, and a shared one…Thank you. Karen
Karen, Where were you yesterday when Rev. Catherine Gross and I had a dialogue about this very thing on “A Place in Your Heart Radio?” Your questions were visited there.
You may replay the program on Blogtalk Radio
I was at work….:( But I am about to tune in to replay, with a huge sigh of gratitude <3