The Cure for Anything

“Teach me how to be loved. We all say this over and over again, in different words or with the shift and sway of our bodies or in the silent spaces where words are left behind.

Teach me how to be loved. Let me show you how to love me well. School me in the workings of your heart, in the language of your bones. Let my open palm memorize the shape of your face. Tell me the stories of your scars so I can trace them with the honor of understanding.

Do you see this fault line? It is where I was broken, over and over again, by the ones who came before you. Are you willing to take that in? My wide open eyes? My truth lives there, if you look for it.
I have been loved by those who didn’t care to discover all that I am. Will you be the one to see me whole?
It gets tangled sometimes. The purity of beginnings become a hazy twist of expectations, the intermingling of past hurts and future fears.

We are the product of all that has already been, and of all that we hope will one day become. We carry with us the bone memory of the loves that we have held and all that has been lost. We don’t ever come into love without the echo of our past singing its siren song.

Teach me how to be loved. It is a relentless forgiveness that allows us to return here, again and again. Past the tears and the leaving and the broken spaces. Back into the hope of more, the possibility of again.
We are made for this. For the sweet vulnerability of now, for the outreach past fear and into unknown. For the extension and unwrapping. Even for the fault lines and the bittersweet of no longer ours.

We are an ancient sort of resilient. Made for the falling and the rising. Made for rose colored glasses and honeyed lips and finding new home in another. Made for the burning down and rebuilding from ashes. Made for the holy wonder of beginning again.

Teach me how to be loved. Show me how to love you well. Our hearts speak fluent optimism even when we try to cloak the hopeful whispers in layers of pessimism masquerading as protection.”

–Jeanette LeBlanc

Oh, that last line.  “Our hearts speak fluent optimism even when we try to cloak the hopeful whispers in layers of pessimism masquerading as protection.” Never truer words were written. Alas, our hearts are dumb fucks. The enternally optimistic heart doesn’t want to listen to the logical brain. Each time the heart gets our ass handed to us, the brain chimes in with, “I told you so!” And the heart replies, “Oh, but next time. Next time. You’ll see.” To which the brain mutters, “Sucker!”

I like the idea that we are composed of fault lines. Perhaps that’s because I lived in California. I don’t know. But I do know that we all contain them. Some just have tiny cracks and others huge fissures, running deep and wide and hidden far beneath the surface, but there just the same. Those hidden fault lines can be the most dangerous. You don’t know that you’re living on them, have built your home, your life on them, until the plates shift, the world shakes, and all hell breaks loose.

However, the eternal optimist in me (a.k.a. That dumb fuck heart) loves the Japanese term kintsukuroi.

Maybe our faults, our most broken down parts, can become the most beautiful parts. Maybe we are more beautiful for having been broken. If, and only if, we are repaired with great care and love. And if we should be broken again?  That’s just another opportunity to be made more beautiful.