Lessons from a broken heart

Beyond the crazed hunger in our culture to be exceptional, loss and sorrow wear away whatever masks we attempt to present to the world. Like the massive stone carvings in the jungles of Central America that now lie broken on the forest floor, the monuments we erect to our own importance collapse. We are stripped of excess and revealed as human in our times of grief. Grief ripens us, pulls up from the depths of our souls what is most authentic in our beings.

In truth, without some familiarity with sorrow, we do not mature as men and women. It is the broken heart, the part that knows sorrow, that is capable of genuine love. The heart familiar with loss is able to recognize "a still deeper grief... a sadness at the very heart of things" that binds us with the world. Without this awareness and willingness to be shaped by life, we remain caught in the adolescent strategies of avoidance and heroic striving.

— Francis Weller, The Wild Edge of Sorrow