To mend your broken heart.
But have you asked your heart
If it wishes to be mended?
We are a species teetering on the brink. War, Fukushima, financial markets collapsing, global warming, governments in complete dysfunction, etc. We have pushed our ways of greed and control and domination so far that we may have pushed ourselves right over the brink.
Power wants to promote fear, and asks us to believe that love, tenderness, and compassion are weak. But they are not. A broken open heart is not weak at all.
Yesterday, Author Andrew Harvey shared this on his Facebook page:
Dear Friends,
It is time for everyone to become aware of what is at stake in the unprecedented crisis of Fukushima. Please turn to the website below and share the information with all your friends.
In this shattering time, I find three things essential: deep prayer, profound attention on loving everyone in our lives with intense compassion, and renewed commitment to go on serving whatever circumstances God may decide to be necessary for our transformation.
Ground yourself in your divine consciousness, surrender to the mystery and pray for deeper and deeper trust in the alchemy of divine wisdom. Do not be afraid, for the Living One is never closer to us then in our hour of deepest need.
Love,
Andrew
 A few years back, I worked with Andrew Harvey through his Institute for Sacred Activism, where he taught us to blend our deep love for the divine with the creative impulse within us for activism.
I don’t know the truth of what is happening at Fukushima. I don’t know that any of us truly know. On one hand, it sounds like what could happen could be absolutely devastating to the human race, as well as so many species and flora, water systems, etc. On the other, it doesn’t serve us to become filled with fear about something that hasn’t happened.
Yet, these three things:
- deep prayer
- profound attention on loving everyone in our lives with intense compassion
- renewed commitment to go on serving whatever circumstances God may decide to be necessary for our transformation
are needed simply because we’ve reached a point of crisis that our thinking just can’t resolve. Whether it be in response to Fukushima, or so many of the other grave situations we have created on our planet, these three things are exactly what we must do.
I would add that the third one -Â whatever circumstances God may decide to be necessary for our transformation – is what is at the root of our creativity.
As Osho wrote, “God is in the new.” The new is where transformation happens. And for anything to be truly creative, it must be transformative, meaning we acknowledge we do not know…and then we step, willingly, into the unknown.
::
The other morning, I was lying in bed waking up and contemplating how much my soul loves beauty – and then I felt the most amazing love holding me…love from the inside. It caused me to weep, the kind of tears that simply run out your eyes and down your face.
In response, I wrote this:
When beauty comes to live in your heart, love is the child that is born.
And then, I wrote this:
As I was waking up this morning, I realized something. I realized that what I love – true, deep, cell-vibrating love – breaks my heart open, makes me smile from my whole body, and in one single flash takes me home to what I’ve longed for and searched for all my life.
My heart does not want to mend right now. Rather, if I allow myself to go there, my heart continually moves toward grief, toward feeling what is here, toward love. It continues to move toward finding the deep well of organic compassion that the deeper recesses of the heart knows well.
::
I went to bed last night with a heavy heart. My heart has broken open so many times in my life, and last night my heart was heavy with the grief of what we’ve done to this beautiful world we’ve been gifted to be a part of. My heart was heavy with thoughts of what my children and grandchildren will experience in the coming decades. And, I realized that I am much closer to the end of my life than the beginning, even not knowing when my day to die will come. And in that realization, something softened. I realized I have lived a good life. I’ve been gifted with so much. It is easy to be in the habit of wanting more and more and more, yet in that moment of seeing a very possible painful future for my grandchildren, I realized that even if I spent the rest of my life in conscious service to the divine to be a source of love, I could never repay what I have been given.
Then, I awoke in the middle of the night with a very clear picture of what must happen. I was shown something profoundly simple, yet incredible beautiful. It wasn’t an image (or promise) of everything being okay. Instead, it was an image of what we are truly here for in these times.
I could see that we are here to LIVE the Miracle – to BE the miracle. The miracle isn’t outside of us. The miracle is us. Living from love rather than fear is the miracle. Living as prayer. Moving from being meaning making creatures to love making creatures.
As I lay in bed, I remembered what The Course in Miracles says about miracles – that a miracle is the shift from fear to love.
Our lives can be an offering of this shift. But to really live this, we can’t choose what we love. If WE are the miracle then the shift from fear to love must be with our whole being for the wholeness of life.
When we love the whole human experience, we are the miracle.
When I discovered unimaginable beauty in the deep waters of grief, I thought I was going crazy at first. How could I feel beauty in this place? But when I let myself love that beauty in grief, I began to feel real and whole again. I felt as human as I did when my daughters were born, when I was alive with both physical pain and sheer unimaginable joy.
It was hard and it was beautiful. Right now we are living in hard and beautiful times, but we will only know the beauty and the full human experience if we feel what is happening, and we open to the whole spectrum of human experience. It’s the beauty of being human…not just in the good times, but in the hard times as well.
Those of us who’ve been sheltered for all of our lives with entitlement, privilege, and safety have known life from only these places…but life is a vulnerable proposition. Underneath a life of relative safety and ease, the rest of life’s experiences lay dormant simply waiting to be known. If we are to love life, it means loving the whole of life…the entirety of what it can mean to be a human being.
This is the miracle. Living this love in the midst of the turmoil, and feeling what it is to be connected, alive, human beings who love this planet, love each other, and deeply love life – right in the shadow of death.
It’s not to romanticize it. That’s not it. I wasn’t romanticizing Gary’s death. The very real living of the grief, the feeling of it deeply, there was the beauty of being human. Not just in good times, but in really, really hard times as well.
After all, death is always here…even when we pretend it isn’t.
::
A few months ago, I went to hear the visionary author, Charles Eisenstein, speak in the city. After his short talk, the audience asked him what it will take to make the shift from our current situation to the kind of world so many of us envision.
His reply? “It will take a miracle.”
As the audience took in his reply, my sense was that people wanted something more substantial. They wanted to be told of something they could do. That’s just my sense, but it’s what I felt. Sometimes that feels easier…just tell me what I can ‘do’ to fix things, and then everything will be okay.
But that isn’t what is true here. Although action is needed, it’s not the action we are used to taking that will shift us, because our current thinking keeps us acting in the same old ways.
As I saw what I saw last night, I had the ‘Aha’ around miracle. We’ve been conditioned to believe miracles occur outside of us, by some miraculous hand and that hand bestows them upon us. Instead, I see that what is new for us human beings is to come to know that our very lives are miracles, that when we shift from fear to the love that is at the heart of what we are we are a living, breathing miracle.
To face whatever comes with love is to love this human life – all of it, without condition, without demand – not just the pretty pictures, but the whole of it.
When I’ve been in deep grief in my life, what has happened every time is that I came to a place where I asked to be relieved of my own self-focus and self-concern. Each time I could see that the ways I focused on my own worries and fears simply got in the way of my ability to be helpful to those around me who really needed me. In those moments, when I prayed for this release, it was given. In that giving I came to directly touch, and share, a love that had no fear.
There is nothing for us to be waiting for. We ARE the miracle wanting to be lived. And, as Andrew Harvey says, “the Living One is never closer to us than in our hour of deepest need.”
