Do you know that Billie Holiday song, Good Morning Heartache?
Good morning Heartache, you old gloomy sight. Good morning Heartache, thought we said goodbye last night…now every day I start by saying to you, Good Morning Heartache, what’s new?
I’ve loved this song from the moment I heard it. Years and years, and it so beautifully illustrates the stickiness of heartache, the persistence of it. The ubiquitousness of it.
And to think it possible to get used to it, to invite it to sit down, interact with it and carry it and hold it. To be able to move through life with a new friend, one who pulls and tugs at your attention, at your heart, to be friends with heartache.
This year has brought a lot of loss into my life, and into our collective lives. Balancing the grief in my heart from the personal losses, the grief in my heart with multiple genocides and a tidal wave of violent rhetoric craving more death from certain large groups of people, balancing it all with love and hope and the potential of new love. Each time I’m thrust into a deeper valley of heartache, I can see the heavens above opening in harmony, this vast expansion all within my heart, knowing that I am containing it, and wondering if I can take any more.
And I find myself in a position I haven’t been in before. I am in the midst of heartbreak, and I’m OK. As much as I can feel the depth of these cracks, I can also feel the heights of starlight, all at the same time, and it’s not too much. In fact, rather than feeling paralyzed by it, I’m painting it. I’m painting the way I did before I considered making art as a living, making art on commission, and I have a new relationship with that process now. Where I once painted my heartache on paper and burned it, I now want to be able to see where I was when I painted what I’m painting now. Because I have grown into comfort with my humanity, I am now embracing it, valuing it in a way I never have before.
To be human is to be divine. We are composed of the same matter as the stars above, all these different configurations of molecules, dancing together in new ways across time and space. We are threads woven into a cosmic dance.
We are taught that we are separate, that in order to be successful we must disown parts of ourselves, compartmentalize, judge others, compete. We are taught that life is structured linearly, with clear goals. We must climb the ladder, we must continue ascending according to the arbitrary rules laid out by violent and sociopathic people who didn’t care about crossing lines of sacred morality, that which has been in our lexicon for millennia—primum non nocere, first do no harm.
We are constantly cycling with nature. Isn’t our existence more cyclical as well? What else on earth, other than the social structure we’ve put in place, is truly linear? There is no hierarchy in spirituality.
This, and much more reflection as well, has helped me to feel ok about my existence. I feel ok being openly sad and heartbroken about what we do to each other, what we do to the water, to the planet, to sacred life all around us. It’s heartbreaking to see people claim compassion while actively harming those around them, to misuse these words, to gaslight themselves into thinking their harm is doing good.
And being ok with all this allowed me to invite heartbreak, in the moment, to sit with me. To hear it out, let it get angry, let it cry, let it punch at the air and shake and dance to release stuck energy, to sit with me as I drink my coffee and smoke my cigarette, to step out the door with me and walk my dog. And I realized that no matter my perspective, this grief, this sadness, this anger, all these emotions that collectively create the heartache, they’re coming with me. Fighting them means I’m constantly fighting myself.
So as I learned to invite all the pieces of myself to the table, it became easier to see Joy, to see Love, to know they’re here too. And as painful as it has been to feel every moment of this current heartbreak, there’s the hand of the Divine Mother on my back, there’s the goddess of the vine cradling me in her arms, there’s Love, always with me, swirling around us all, all the time. Love, all day. And I appreciate the pain I’m in right now, I know it’s a part of love, all that love I had to give and share, all the potential love others, now gone, had to give as well, and when in a concentrated dose, it’s all so big it hurts. Loss is this concentrated love, like the infinite stretches of the love and potential love snapping back into a tiny dense object, a reverse big bang.
And I can’t wait to see what comes when it expands once more.