How is Your Heart Breaking?
An open discussion thread
Something has shifted in the world.
I don’t understand it yet, so I cannot write about it.
I’ve tried, honestly, but everything I type feels false, premature, and really just empty.
The only thing I’ve found which comes close to describing this sense I have is what Gordon White wrote:
“As it was with the Canadian Nazi salute, what’s happening in Gaza pauses or suspends all energy flow in one’s life, as if the archons have trapped you in a human-sized bubble of horror.”
That’s how it feels, really. And exactly as he says, because that’s also how I felt about the event in the Canadian parliament. Constriction, like the distant vistas of humanity were suddenly revealed to be merely convincing stage backdrop.
As I said, though, I don’t know what else to say about it. Not about the conflict in Palestine itself — which doesn’t need my words anyway — but the larger shift around it.
Something has changed, and will keep changing, and will eventually reveal itself to us as a thing of initially-incomprehensible horror until we find the words to define it.
There’s nothing else to say right now about it.
But I do want to know: how are you feeling? What’s it feel like in your world right now? Gordon ended his short essay with the following lines:
“So a broken heart is also a heart that is breaking open so that it becomes larger, so that it can hold more of the grief and the love and the joy and the pain of the whole cosmos. That is what it is for. That is what you are for.
That is yours to do.”
So, how is your heart breaking right now? How has it been so constricted, its borders too close-in, that the love inside it is threatening to flood out?
Please tell me. I don’t want to know (and please don’t share) an analysis of these events. Instead, I want to know about your heart.
With love,
—Rhyd
I suspect my answer will horrify you (and a lot of people), and probably rightly so, but I honor you and your creative space a lot, so:
I don't really feel anything about it. I felt mild surprise and an extremely detached sort of "why would they do something like that? It doesn't make any strategic sense" and went on with my day. There have been bigger body counts in other places every single day- and I don't feel a lot about them, either.
I don't want to say my heart is EMPTY, because that doesn't feel quite right- and I took a very good genuine look after reading this post, to answer sincerely. And the sincere answer- to my dismay- is: I find that I just don't care very much. I care about my dad not dying too soon, and my husband's mental health holding steady, and my friends finding jobs or otherwise not ending up destitute or homeless. And that's kind of it.
Am I SUPPOSED to care about it all, all at once, all the time? It seems like too big an ask. I don't feel wired for it.
Am I defective?
I think there is something real and true in the notion of "the heart" ... which isn't the pulsing, muscular multichamber 'pump' of William Harvey's description. In chi gung and Tai chi ... and traditional Chinese medicine there is the middle of the Three Dantian which corresponds with the heart area. And some of India's traditions there is the notion of the chakras, one of which is the heart. Or, rather, it is located near the heart, and is conceived not as the physical heart organ, per se, but as an "energetic" center in "the subtle body" -- or something to this effect.
The heart chakra of Indian subtle / energetic / emotional cartography is called anahata, a word meaning literally "unstruck". I once read that it is called unstruck because it is like a musical instrument which vibrates without its "strings" having been struck or plucked. It just has its vibration, and does what it does without the need of the intervention of strumming, stroking, plucking.... It's a nice image. I can remember feeling that and knowing just what they mean. And the word "unstruck" also evoked for me a sense of nothing having been injured, broken, harmed -- a sense of it not being strikable in a harmful way, not really. Not ultimately.
But I haven't had that kind of innocence in a long time.
There is a place in my spine, just behind the area where the heart chakra is said to be, which has been constrained, tormented, I dunno... just fucked up... for a long time. Maybe this is the residue of too many heartbreaks? Too many blows. Too much shock and horror. I haven't had direct, conscious access to a certain quality of innocence -- for years. And I'm now worn out and tired.
The various wars ... Afghanistan, Iraq, Ukraine, and this latest one in Israel / Palestine ... have combined with other injuries to my heart, most notably the complete and utter lack of an appropriate response to the climate and ecological crises (metacrisis, polycrisis...). I can feel ... a sense of hopelessness, a dwindling capacity for hope in the form of believing in the possibility of healing and ... appropriate responsiveness ... in our world. A feeling that nothing I could do -- or not do -- can really make a difference in relation to the general pattern in our world, a pattern of endless atrocities and horrors ... which I can see and feel but which I cannot lately feel will ever cease to be. History seems to me an unending pattern of exploitation, abuse, violence and just plain horrors. And when my heart was less ruined I felt that my life could matter, that I could offer something. But now I just feel utterly overwhelmed with sorrows which have no balm, no hope of healing or resolving. It is overwhelming, and so it is all trauma. For that is what trauma is. It is a state of overwhelm.
My heart is overwhelmed.