Heart Food
by Mary Lydia, sx/so 2w3 9w1 7w6
“But you know, you know I know that nothing’s fine.” - Purity Ring
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“But you know, you know I know that nothing’s fine.” - Purity Ring 🩸
I know sometimes it may feel that I’m treating pain with flippancy… that my desire to bring light feels like an avoidance of excavating depth that I refuse to see. It is true that I lull myself to sleep with the belief that I can awaken even the dead with my pure love’s healing kiss.
The truth is that there is a profound intimacy with grief which dictates all of my actions. It is an ancient sort of grief… felt deep in my bones and flowing in my blood bubbling beneath smiles and hearts. Eyes forever wet; tears begging to spill over. It threatens to erupt at any second and a few tears frequently escape at moments of both joy and tragedy without my consent. I know if its release were wholly permitted, I would drown.
To do anything but shine love and light feels impossible. If I allow myself to drown and melt in a puddle of my own tears, I risk existential annihilation. I risk my own heart. Because a heart that cannot move is a heart that cannot exist… a heart that cannot be seen as loving… and a heart that cannot therefore be loved.
Grief threatens to overtake me often if I’m alone, and I cannot accomplish anything. All I can do is cry and secretly nurse a heart that feels like it has been broken since my birth and is trying to be healed through healing others. Soothing you is my only medicine.
It is an awareness of, but refusal to accept and resign oneself to the tragedies of what is. It is a knowing that I can contain your grief within me too; that I can heal you and absorb it and metabolize it into heart fuel and love that we can both feed on. It took a very long time to see that I am as dependent on your grief and love as I told us that you were on me.
It is not just my own pain I try to keep locked away… i feel yours just as powerfully. I know your feelings are not mine to consume. I know they’re not about me. I know it’s not my place, I know, but cannot bear to stand idly by and watch you drown. It is a projection of sorts… framed as selflessness, but secretly invested in my own anesthetization. It’s also a potential opportunity to create a dependency, further highlighting my usefulness as heart in motion; love in action. Mother Mary Lydia; Healer of Hearts. Many times it backfires and I feel bitterness. Something that is mine to feel, not yours, I know. It is a consequence of invasiveness. One I voluntarily suffer by my own hand time after time.
I feel gratitude toward the intuition of my 9 fix which knows sometimes it’s best to hold space and it clamps itself down from root to tongue to silence and still my compulsion and prevent my heart from feasting on your grief and my martyrdom.
There is a quote I love …
“Before one studies Zen, mountains are mountains and waters are waters; after a first glimpse into the truth of Zen, mountains are no longer mountains and waters are no longer waters; after enlightenment, mountains are once again mountains and waters once again waters.”
(There are more stages of Zen detachment than described within this quote. In a state of “Karma I,” it is said that one can move from attachment to name & form to “Form is emptiness; emptiness is form.”- Heart Sutra)
Before I studied enneagram I viewed my heart as selfless and its emissions as purely joyful and kind. After a glimpse further inside my heart, I knew I was not selfless and purely joy and kindness… and as I travel further I see that I am selfless and selfish. I am joy and grief. That my heart contains it all.
This insight only does so much in quelling my compulsion to lighten…
“But you know, you know I know that nothing’s fine.” - Purity Ring
