Broken Hearts

First, a disclaimer.  This IS NOT a rant about a breakup or anything of the mushy-gushy sort, a fact I feel I must clarify, partly because I feel like I always associated broken hearts with romance as though the phrase was patented by whatever pop singer happened to be the latest rage.  I shrugged off just about anything that referred to hearts being broken as something that didn't apply to me because I didn't intend to do any heart breaking or to experience it for myself.  But, after much reflection and stepping outside my shallow definition of a broken heart, I found that I have had a broken heart, many times, and from that have found a glorious ocean of wisdom and understanding and love.  And I just wanted to share a little bit about that.

Second, an apology.  I feel like here I spew my thoughts with intention to clean them up before presenting them to anyone, but they just sort of slip past that clean up phase more often than I would like to admit.  So my apologies if what is written here fails to make sense or end up as rambles rather than something worth reading.  Also, thank you, dear reader, for indulging such a long prologue.

I just finished reading a wonderful book by Kate DiCamillo, The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane.  While a children's book, I found it deep and moving, absolutely refreshing and much needed after some rather jagged literature that I had encountered earlier that week.  It follows a china rabbit who experiences several unexpected turnovers in his life and changes because of them and the people involved with them.  He learns to love, but not without heartbreak, and his story deepened my understanding of the phrase.  It may be considered juvenille, I feel like love is really a timeless, ageless theme, not limited to one age group.  DiCamillo begins with a quote from a poem called "The Testing-Tree" by Stanley Kunitz and I feel like today, it resonated with me. "The heart breaks and lives by breaking."  

My heart broke today.  I realized that it was time to change and while that was good and I knew it was coming and I was looking forward to it, being confronted by the reality of it--an actual time when I was expected in a place other than home and its surroundings--stunned me and I sort of reeled for a little bit.  That heartbreak didn't happen because I was rejected or spurned or was let go, it happened because my life as I knew it was changing.  I feel like change--at least for often stiff, inflexible me--invariably brings with it a break in me somewhere.  Yet, thats not a bad thing, really.  Yes, it means pain, ache, hurt.  But it is good to be broken.  It means that one can be restored and helped--if we seek it out and receive it.  I love scriptures that refer to broken hearts:

"And ye shall offer for a sacrifice unto me a broken heart and a contrite spirit. And whoso cometh unto me with a broken heart and a contrite spirit, him will I baptize with fire and with the Holy Ghost, even as the Lamanites, because of their faith in me at the time of their conversion, were baptized with fire and with the Holy Ghost, and they knew it not.  3 Nephi 9:20

  "The Lord is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart; 
   and saveth such as be of a contrite spirit."  Psalms 34:18

I think that life includes a lot of broken heart periods.  I hope that I can receive it, with the hope of becoming more wise and understanding and sensitive rather than recoil from it and become bitter about it.

How do you embrace having a broken heart?