“Life will break you,” Louise Erdrich wrote in her passionate insistence that “you are here to risk your heart.” It can happen with a shattering, or with a thousand small fissures, but the great paradox — the great salvation — is that every time it happens, you live to see you are unbreakable.
And so, a poem.
CORRECTIVE FOR A BROKEN HEART by Maria Popova
Why all the threadbare drama,
the stale catastrophism
of calling it broken?
It still beats,
doesn’t it,
still trembles at the sight
of fog flowing through the forest
like a slow dance song.
It was only
dislocated,
lost its locus
for a while,
popped out of the socket
of good sense.
There is no one
to pick up the pieces
because there are no pieces.
Only the firm, fastidious
hand of time
to slide it back
into place.
And after all
who can fault
the wayward compass
when the magnetic north pole
is in constant motion
drifting by fifty kilometers a year
and reversing itself altogether
every few centuries
while each twenty-six thousand years
a different north star
comes to shine its guiding light
above all the confusion.
One of the hardest realizations in life, and one of the most liberating, is that our mothers are neither saints nor saviors — they are just people who, however messy or painful our childhood may have been, and however complicated the adult relationship, have loved us the best way they knew how, with the cards they were dealt and the tools they had.
It is a whole life’s work to accept this elemental fact, and a life’s triumph to accept it not with bitterness but with love.
How to make that liberating shift of perspective is what the playwright, suffragist, and psychologist Florida Scott-Maxwell (September 14, 1883–March 6, 1979) considers in a passage from her 1968 autobiography The Measure of My Days (public library).
A mother’s love for her children, even her inability to let them be, is because she is under a painful law that the life that passed through her must be brought to fruition. Even when she swallows it whole she is only acting like any frightened mother cat eating its young to keep it safe.
With a wary eye to the brunt of parental expectation under which all children live, well into adulthood, she writes:
No matter how old a mother is she watches her middle-aged children for signs of improvement. It could not be otherwise for she is impelled to know that the seeds of value sown in her have been winnowed. She never outgrows the burden of love, and to the end she carries the weight of hope for those she bore. Oddly, very oddly, she is forever surprised and even faintly wronged that her sons and daughters are just people, for many mothers hope and half expect that their newborn child will make the world better, will somehow be a redeemer. Perhaps they are right, and they can believe that the rare quality they glimpsed in the child is active in the burdened adult.
It is strange how, in a universe governed by relentless change, human beings hunger for constancy — our bodies wired for homeostasis, our minds hooked on habit, our hearts yearning for everlasting love. We live as patterns unaware of perpetuating themselves, our aching resistance to change reflected in the routines and rituals and relationship formulae out of which we build the superstructure of belief that houses all of our actions, reactions, and choices.
It is not easy, reconfiguring this superstructure to fit something new — a new practice, a new person, a new way of being. The more transformative the new element, the more challenging it is to figure it into the pattern of life as we know it — a pattern shaped by what we believe about love, that deepest sinew of the self.
This delicate, difficult, wildly rewarding reconfiguration is what Terry Tempest Williams explores in When Women Were Birds: Fifty-four Variations on Voice (public library) — a soaring meditation on life, love, and the stories we tell ourselves about who we are, sparked by an unexpected revelation: When Williams opened the journals her mother had bequeathed her, she was staggered to find them all blank — a kind of “second death” that catalyzed a profound reckoning with the meaning of voice, of words, of how we write the story of who we are and how we revise it, lensed through the love of birds she shared with her mother.
Two decades later, at the exact age her mother was when she died, Williams writes:
Love is to life what life is to death. And so we risk everything trying to touch the ineffable by touching each other. Over and over. Again and again… Patterned behavior alternates like shadow and light… We can change, evolve, and transform our own conditioning. We can choose to move like water rather than be molded like clay. Life spirals in and then spirals out on any given day. It does not have to be one way, one truth, one voice. Nor does love have to be all or nothing.
Because we suffer a congenital blindness to what lies on the other side of transformation — a blindness brilliantly illustrated by the Vampire Problem thought experiment — it is often chance, not choice, that brings about the profoundest change. Life sweeps us off course — a terrible diagnosis arrives, an unimagined opportunity emerges, an unexpected person enters the heart — and suddenly we must begin again, rebuilding the superstructure of being on this new terrain. (“It could happen any time…”)
Williams finds improbable consolation for the challenge of change in her encounter with a bird out of place. The painted bunting — the most exuberantly colored bird north of Mexico, which so confused Linnaeus with its exotic plumage that he falsely classified it as native to India; a species now thought to orient by the pole star during migration — “had flown in on the tail of a blizzard, been blown off course, and stayed,” making a new life in Maine, a new pattern of being: Each day just before dawn, the painted bunting alighted to a neighbor’s bird feeder like clockwork.
Painted bunting by Mark Catesby, 1729-1731. (Available as an art print and as stationery cards, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)
Watching the bird one snowy morning, Williams writes:
At 6:43 a.m. the painted bunting arrived, like a dream between the crease of shadow and light. His silhouette grew toward color for the seven short minutes he stayed. And when dawn struck his tiny feathered back, he ignited like a flame: red, blue, and green.
[…]
The bunting got caught in a storm and stayed. I have been seized in a storm of my own making. Whirlwind. World-wind. Distracted and displaced. In the wounding of becoming lost, I can correct myself.
We can take flight from our lives in a form other than denial and return to our authentic selves… Accidental sightings, whether witnessed in a brain or on a winter dawn, remind us there is no such thing as certainty.
I want to feel both the beauty and the pain of the age we are living in. I want to survive my life without becoming numb. I want to speak and comprehend words of wounding without having these words become the landscape where I dwell. I want to possess a light touch that can elevate darkness to the realm of stars.
This vascular malformation could bleed and burst. Or I can simply go on living, appreciating my condition as a vulnerable human being in a vulnerable world, guided by the songs of birds. What is time, sacred time, but the acceleration of consciousness? There are so many ways to change the sentences we have been given.
“The things we want are transformative, and we don’t know or only think we know what is on the other side of that transformation,” Rebecca Solnit wrote in her exquisite Field Guide to Getting Lost.
The wanting starts out innocently — awaiting the birthday, the new bicycle, Christmas morning; awaiting the school year to end, or to begin. Soon, we are awaiting the big break, the great love, the day we finally find ourselves — awaiting something or someone to deliver us from the tedium of life-as-it-is, into some other and more dazzling realm of life-as-it-could-be, all the while vacating the only sanctuary from the storm of uncertainty raging outside the frosted windows of the here and now.
It matters not at all whether we are holding our breath for a triumph or bracing for a tragedy. For as long as we are waiting, we are not living.
If we are not careful enough with the momentum of our own minds, we can live out our days in this expectant near-life existence.
That is what Henry James (April 13, 1843–February 28, 1916) explores in his 1903 novella The Beast in the Jungle, found in his collection The Better Sort (public library | public domain) — the story of a man whose entire life, from his earliest memory, has been animated by “the sense of being kept for something rare and strange, possibly prodigious and terrible,” something fated “sooner or later to happen” and, in happening, to either destroy him or remake his life. He calls it “the thing,” imagines it as a “beast in the jungle” lying in wait for him, and spends his life lying in wait for it, withholding his participation in the very experiences that might have that transformative effect — leaping after some great dream, risking his life for some great cause, falling in love.
It is, of course, a dramatized caricature of our common curse — the treacherous “if only” mind that haunts all of us, in one way or another, to some degree or other, as we go through life expecting the next moment to contain what this one does not and, in granting us some mythic missing piece that forever keeps us from the warm glad feeling of enoughness, to render our lives worthy of having been lived.
Since it was in Time that he was to have met his fate, so it was in Time that his fate was to have acted; and as he waked up to the sense of no longer being young, which was exactly the sense of being stale, just as that, in turn, was the sense of being weak, he waked up to another matter beside. It all hung together; they were subject, he and the great vagueness, to an equal and indivisible law. When the possibilities themselves had accordingly turned stale, when the secret of the gods had grown faint, had perhaps even quite evaporated, that, and that only, was failure. It wouldn’t have been failure to be bankrupt, dishonoured, pilloried, hanged; it was failure not to be anything.
When the protagonist meets a woman to whom his entire being pulls him, he begins spending time with her but ultimately keeps her heart at arm’s length, too afraid to love her, telling himself that he is protecting her from his fatalistic fate, failing to recognize that love itself is that great force of self-annihilation and transformation, “rare and strange” even as the most commonplace human experience.
Discus chronologicus — a German depiction of time from the early 1720s. (Available as a print and as a wall clock.)
When Time forecloses possibility, as Time always ultimately does, he arrives at his final reckoning at her tombstone:
The escape would have been to love her; then, then he would have lived. She had lived — who could say now with what passion? — since she had loved him for himself… The Beast had lurked indeed, and the Beast, at its hour, had sprung; it had sprung in that twilight of the cold April when, pale, ill, wasted, but all beautiful, and perhaps even then recoverable, she had risen from her chair to stand before him and let him imaginably guess. It had sprung as he didn’t guess; it had sprung as she hopelessly turned from him, and the mark, by the time he left her, had fallen where it was to fall. He had justified his fear and achieved his fate; he had failed, with the last exactitude, of all he was to fail of; and a moan now rose to his lips… This was knowledge, knowledge under the breath of which the very tears in his eyes seemed to freeze. Through them, none the less, he tried to fix it and hold it; he kept it there before him so that he might feel the pain. That at least, belated and bitter, had something of the taste of life. But the bitterness suddenly sickened him, and it was as if, horribly, he saw, in the truth, in the cruelty of his image, what had been appointed and done. He saw the Jungle of his life and saw the lurking Beast; then, while he looked, perceived it, as by a stir of the air, rise, huge and hideous, for the leap that was to settle him. His eyes darkened — it was close; and, instinctively turning, in his hallucination, to avoid it, he flung himself, face down, on the tomb.
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