Winter Without Happiness

Happiness was my lover before the dark times.  Together we laughed through carefree, barefoot days and her hair sparkled in the dappled, spring sunlight.  Our lives were tangled up in the soft intimacy of quiet comfort, secure in each other and our places in the world.  Every activity, no matter how mundane, was made more beautiful with Happiness in my heart and by my side.  We felt certain our days would carry on as blissfully as the summer roses unfolded in the mornings.

Photo via Flickr "roses" by Samantha Forsberg is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 

Autumn brought with it a hint of the dark times to come but we bundled warmly and laughed in the crisp winds that playfully threw up leaves for us to dance in.  Happiness found beauty in the smallest things and the bite of the rain on a sharp edge of the wind simply reminded her she was alive.

Photo via Flickr "autumn and you" by cherry-vn licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0 

The dark times descended with a powerful suddenness that was inescapable.  Brooding clouds swept low with the same fateful thunderous wind that tore Happiness and I asunder.  Straining to reach each other and being dragged off by the dark, roaring winds of change, our hands, the last things to be torn from one another, our lonely, empty hands, haunted my memories.

Dragged reluctantly into a private war I fought many lonely, cold and dark battles.  I walked barren paths without companionship and the warmth of hope.  I had lost Happiness to the vast, lingering darkness.  What hope was left for me?  I wished for her sake she had found someone to share her days with and all the while I resigned myself to the lonely gloom being my continued lot in life.  I was a prisoner of the darkness and there was no hope of escape.  Memories of Happiness would float unbidden to my mind in the small hours of the lonely morning.  Bitter loss accompanied the heartbreaking longing I felt for Happiness.  I had once found perfect and beautiful ease in her company and the loss tightened my chest with memories of the dreadful, inescapable moment when I lost everything for which I cared.

Photo via Flickr "darkest path" by Mrs Janet R licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 

Somehow, amidst threats of still worse ends, I was released from my captivity.  I cared not that I was free; life was wearisome without Happiness.  Aimless wandering down tangled and dark paths seemed to lead further into the darkness.  My loneliness and lack of hope were complete.  I trudged on with tearful footfalls amidst the overgrown, winding way.  The fates were nudging me forward to better days though the overgrowth served to hide the gradually lightening skies from my view.  Hopeless and weary I moved with unnoticing and heavy tread through leaves that Happiness, had she the misfortune to walk this road, might have found beauty in.


Suddenly, it seemed so suddenly, my path ended in a town I no longer recognized as home.  Did it feel familiar because I had been here before or because all days were tinged with a familiar bleak and weary tint?  I cared not.  Tales wound through town of a worn out, empty husk of a person who had wandered through the darkness so long they no longer remembered the light.  One such tale reached Happiness.  She mourned for this broken soul and something began to glimmer in her mind, the first hint of hope that it might be me.  If the darkness could relinquish one soul it could relinquish me.

Photo via Flickr "roses" by PHOTOPHANATIC1 is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 

In a way my inner darkness was a spectacle.  Intriguing and self-contained it was a safe danger that drew spectators with its mystery.  Slowly pieces of my tale circulated in swirling dark eddies through town.  A poor soul, parted from Happiness, doomed to walk a weary world alone.  The story of my loss finally reached her and a whispered name of who I used to be.  The wind brought it to her ear.  The wind also whispered to me, Happiness, was all it said.  But somehow I knew that she was in reach.  I began to weep; all the tears I had not dared to feel in my loneliness and all the hopes I barely dared to believe could no longer be contained.  I shed my black mantle and walked haltingly to stand in the sunlight.  I will look for Happiness again.  And ever since Happiness heard my name, she has been running through the streets trying to find me.

Photo "Spring" by Madder Hatter licensed under CC BY 2.0 

“Ever since happiness heard your name, it has been running through the streets trying to find you.” Hafiz of Persia

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This short story was inspired by the quote from Hafiz of Persia “Ever since happiness heard your name, it has been running through the streets trying to find you.”

It struck me suddenly that I've grown up thinking of Happiness as a teasing woodland spirit who is ever fleeing from your grasp, at her best, and at her worst, as never showing her face so that you doubt her existence.  I loved the idea of Happiness actively seeking you out.  This beautiful quote immediately reminded me of parted lovers and thus this story of parting and longing and hopeful reunion was born.

Photo via Flickr "Italian roses" by Steve Batch UK licensed under CC BY 2.0 

It is not for me to write about the reunion.  This is because you and I, we are each of us the protagonist, and the story of our separation from Happiness may be similar, but the story of our reunion with Happiness will be as unique as we are.  All I know is that Happiness is trying to find you and it is up to you to step outside into the sunlight and write your own reunion story.

Mending a Heart of Glass

So what do you do with a life when your heart lies in shattered piles of glass on the ground?

You cry.

Broken things need to be cared for, grieved over.  You can't pretend the trauma didn't happen, you can't push it down and just carry on.  You have to take the sad, broken things out of the pile at the back of your closet and bring them tenderly into soft morning light and grieve over them.  You need to weep for your pain, for your broken dreams, for yourself.

It's now June, nine months after I wrote about the wreckage that was once my heart and how it was first broken into a million jagged pieces of shattered dreams. (In the post When a Glass Heart Shatters).  And I think it is no coincidence that nine months after this accident I'm ready to revisit this topic and give an answer.  Nine months, the amount of time it takes for a baby to be born with a new heart, or, as I see it, the amount of time it takes for a broken heart to be reborn new.

But a new heart is not reborn without work.  At first you cannot even begin this work.  You must live from one moment to the next.  Trying to do otherwise is overwhelming.  In my other post I spoke about instinctively knowing that forwards and backwards were not options.  After a shattering the past is too painful.  There is no going back.  After a shattering the person you were and the life you had are broken and will never be the same again.  Thinking about the past only reminds you of how painful and broken you are in comparison to the whole person you used to be and your reality cuts you all the deeper.  The future is also too terrifying to contemplate; filled with unknowns and consequences that you know must arise from your shattering, but you do not have the courage to think about at first.  Instinctively you know that you can only change directions, but with the sudden way that all your old plans shattered, all new things feel unsafe.

So until you are strong enough to face anything else, you live only in the now.  Only living in this exact moment.  That is how you survive until you are strong enough to face new things and the implications of the shattering you lived through.  And you must keep crying.  You must grieve for all your pains, all your losses.  You must grieve in many different ways and you must allow yourself to feel as hurt as you are, pushing it down and pretending you are not hurt will not aid in your healing. 

Then slowly with determination not to allow yourself to die in a heap in the gutter you pick yourself up.  You stagger, you trudge one foot at time away.  Anywhere.  Just away from the wreckage.  Maybe you go right, maybe you double back to the wreckage and go left.  Maybe you fall a few feet away and cry.  But every time you slowly pick yourself up and trudge one step further.  You cling to family and friends for support.  The ones that stick by you are the ones you cherish as true friends.  Throughout this process of healing you will need them all the more.

And slowly in your stumbling steps you live in the moment and find that you notice things around you.  It may be a funny shaped crack in the pavement, or a brightly coloured leaf that has caught your eye.  You may notice a broken sign or a beautifully exuberant dog.  Noticing the broken things will touch on your pain and gently, ever so gently you will start to think about those wounds and heal.  Noticing the bright, beautiful and living things will slowly remind you of the beauty that can still be found in your world and you will gently begin to heal.  Always in noticing and gentle reflection there is healing.

One day, after who knows how many months of grieving and living in the moment, your staggering steps will find a hint of a path.  Just the beginning of one.  You allow the love of family and friends to sustain you and you let them gently guide you towards a straighter path, pushing you gently towards something that almost looks like progress.  It doesn't always look brave and big.  Progress can be as small as admitting that your past is staying in the past.  Progress can be admitting that you need to continue to stagger away from the wreck.  Progress could be finding a flower growing from a crack in the sidewalk and letting yourself believe that there can be hope in a sea of despair.  Or perhaps you just admit that you are still looking for answers, a way forward and you don't have them yet.

Looking eventually leads towards finding.

In September I decided I would curl up by the wreckage and wait for answers.  That was as brave as my looking was capable of being at that time.  I was waiting for God, for direction, for an answer for a start and a path.  My path had shattered.  I felt alone.  But out of a stubborn determination not to let my brokenness consume me I got up and moved one step.  Determination, and the love of family, and friends (and a few animals), kept me putting one foot in front of the other.

I admitted that my past was broken, that I was different.  I found that I could still find a sad beauty in the world and I left the glass shards of my heart in the back corner of my mind until I was strong enough to deal with them.

Don't get me wrong, I didn't wake up one day and find myself strong enough to do it.  I needed prodding and coaxing to even start.  The friends who care about me have pushed me closer to the pile of shards.  And some days I did a bit of clean up.  Some days I honestly sat on the curb by the glass shards and sobbed, grieving the injuries and the events that led me to this state.  Grieving for the wounds and the losses I've sustained.  Slowly there were days where I was finally able to make halting progress of consolidation and tidying.  I was starting to work on myself.  I went to therapy, saw a doctor, started caring for myself, for my physical, mental and emotional well-being.

And I personally think that God must have been listening to my silent cry in September because I think he sent me the people I needed in my life in order for me survive it.  He sent the right friends to be there for me.  He sent steadfast friends who knew the depths of my pain.  He sent me people to support me, cry with me, lift me up and love me.

Lastly, he sent me an artist.  I didn't know I needed one until he arrived.  God sent me an artist who saw all the broken pieces of my heart lying hopeless in the gutter and still found beauty in them.  And so I sat beside my heap of jagged, broken pieces of heart and I decided to grieve the injuries done to them and finally start to straighten up the mess.

When my artist would see a new wound I would see a sadness in his face that finally allowed me to feel as though I could openly grieve the deepest cuts.  I couldn't always see the beauty in my brokenness that he saw, but I was tired of avoiding the scene of the gutter and leaving that mess hanging around to loom over me and shadow my days.  So, slowly, ever so slowly, I picked up small pieces of jagged glass flung far out into the street and I grieved over them and put them in the main pile, consolidating.  One piece of glass at a time I tried to straighten up the carnage of my broken heart and dreams.

Cleaning up such an accident is more of a journey than a task.  It involves grief, and pain and it's a long painstaking process.  And when a heart has broken in such a dramatic fashion your body builds knots of emotional walls around it to try to prevent the damage from spreading.  So, you have to spend time carefully unraveling the knots of distrust, broken promises and other hastily constructed emotional walls in order to even come close enough to start cleaning up the scene of the accident.  This process is painful, but it is necessary for healing.

Some days you make real progress, you find a way to take three steps forward; you deliberately pull down small portions of the walls you worked so hard to build.  But there are also days where the emotional pain is too much and you kick pieces of your heart further into the gutter in frustration, despair and black misery.

But sitting beside me, bending down to reach into the gutter, not shying away from the dirt, jagged edges and misery is the artist that was sent to me.   Every time I fell he picked me up.  He grieved with me.  He took the broken pieces of my heart that I kicked into a corner.  He gathered them up gently and he told me that light shines through the cracks where the heart has been broken before.

He helped me go searching for words I could speak to my fear.  We embarked on a journey together; going through the Artist's Way which has taught me enough to be the subject of many future posts.  For now, however, it is worth mentioning that it is teaching me to practice gentle self-care and to speak back against the dark, doubting thoughts of fear in my mind.

My artist helped me find my words for safety by always being a safe place for my emotions to rest and by searching with me for the right words to fight back against the darkness.  I found them in an unexpected place.  Alongside my Artist, I had the privilege of hearing a Mayan Tribal Elder speak at a Cocoa Ceremony where she spoke about the tribulations of her people.  She said "We do not admit that we were conquered.  We were invaded, yes, but not conquered.  They may have tried to kill us.  They buried us.  But they didn't know they were planting seeds."  The moment I heard these words I began to cry.  These were the words I had been searching for to bring the piece of hope I couldn't find on my own.

How does one live in a world where bad things happen, where you know they can happen at any time to you, and still feel safe?  Here is where I find safety.  That whatever bad things may come, whether or not they kill me, they will only be planting seeds.  I may not be the same after.  But I will grow back, I will be stronger.  I am unstoppable.  And in this lies my safety.

On this journey, my Artist helped me notice the beautiful things.  As time went on he kept showing me the beautiful things in life, in the little moments as well as the big ones.  Every time I saw beauty in the world I would discover a small piece of my heart that wasn't completely broken.  The mess in the gutter was less daunting.  And slowly, he helped me gather all the pieces together with love.  He melted the broken pieces of my heart back together and he added new material, new glass, and my heart is now encased in this protective case of new glass that has no memory of fragility and is therefore stronger than ever.  And the cracks in the old pieces of my heart shine with the tenderness of empathy that brokenness pours into a heart.

I am old and new.  No, you cannot undo the brokenness, but you can decide what happens next.  I have found a seed at the bottom of the shattered heap and with the heat from a forge I have brought forth a tiny plant, my heart a Phoenix rising from the wreckage.  And my new heart, born with work and patience was given so much love by friends and family that I can never adequately express my gratitude to those who gave it.

When a Glass Heart Shatters

In September I asked this question and I meant everything that follows.  I'm posting it now because I think a lot of people go through life shatterings and feel alone and don't know what to do about it.  So, here is what I lived through:

What do you do with your life when your heart has been shattered into thousands of jagged pieces of broken glass?  All of them crumbled into a glittering heap of broken dreams that were once shiny and new, now lying flat on their faces in the road tarnished by dirt and no longer reflecting hope.

Some people have advised gathering all these jagged pieces of your heart together, picking them up and continuing down the same path you were on before.  I've looked at all their sharp edges and balked.  Gathering them up will only cut up my hands.

There is no mending of broken glass.  It's broken, it can't be put back together, picking up the fragments is dangerous to the safety of the rest of me.  I don't need to bleed from other places while I try hopelessly to salvage broken portions of my heart.

Over the last few years, I've sort of put a fence around my heart.  Caution tape and orange plastic fences around the scene of the accident.  Head on collision, lots of broken glass all in a heap.  Every so often on weekends, I stop by to marvel at the wreckage.  Even less often I come prepared with gloves and tweezers and I stoop down close to the pile.  I'll gather up two pieces of glass and glue them together and then leave them off to the side.  Maybe one day they'll function again, but I don't hold my breath.  There is one chunk of my heart still functioning and I've left it in there for examination by experts at the scene.

When these experts are on shift they do detective work and try to figure out where things went wrong and I more or less give the whole thing a really wide berth.  I don't walk the same path anymore.  I don't do the same things.  I've essentially left my heart in it's crumbled little pile and carried on with the one chunk I have left.

What's the point of picking up the pieces?  The world isn't what we want it to be.  It's not our bloody oyster.  It's the way it is.  Cold, impersonal, brutal and real.  It doesn't care if your heart gets involved in a twenty car pile up on the freeway, or is beaten with a bat, or gets thrown against a wall at the end of a relationship.  Whether you've lost someone, lost a dream, lost a whole life, lost all hope, it makes no difference.  The world is just the way it is and stumbling around brokenly carrying bloody handfuls of shattered glass isn't going to change that.

No, you can't just go on.  You'll never be the same.  Even if you miraculously managed to piece together your heart and glue it together with a billion uneven fractures into a whole heart you wouldn't be the same.  Even if you gathered every tiny sliver of glass up and not a single piece was left lying in the street you wouldn't be the same.  You would always have the scars, the fractures that were just a little bit weaker, the chance you could shatter again more easily, and the memory.  Even if you melted all of your glass fragments down and reformed them again you would remember that once they laid shattered in a heap, alone, broken, hopeless in a gutter.  And you would feel more fragile for it.

So knowing this, knowing all of this and looking at the sad pile of broken glass on the ground that used to belong to me, what do I do?  Solitude is calling to me but it offers no respite.  It calls in the way that solitude calls to a wounded animal.  It wants me to slink off to a solitary place and hope for a peaceful death.  My wounds, however, are not fatal.  They are of the marring variety, the sort that almost make you wish you'd died but leave you unmercifully in a state of sadly altered life.

Never.

The word that caused this shattering with a single blow.  It's finality gripping and crushing and harsh.

So where do you go from here?  Part of my life has ended violently, shattered and gone.  I see it lying there hopelessly fractured.  How can there be a forward now?  My cat nature tells me that I cannot go either forward or back.  That leaves me left and right.  But both options seem hopeless when faced with the jagged remains of what used to be a heart and the dreams that are gone forever.

Maybe I will lie here, curled up near the scene of the crime and wait for an answer on what comes next.  I hope God is listening because he is also involved in this wreck.  But I have lost hope that he will answer.

So, what do I do? 

If you want to know what I did with my life and my heart in the months that followed, the continuation post: Mending a Heart of Glass, will be posted soon.

Why aren't Mouse Cages More Interesting?

My Uncle has just started a business raising fancy mice as pets.  He breeds them to be docile and in all sorts of colors and varieties.  And so I was contemplating his selection of mice and remembering the hamsters we used to keep in childhood.  This started me down a whole weird path about what I did and didn't like about keeping hamsters as a kid.

It occurred to me that I don't actually mind mice or hamsters, but I really mind their cages.  Our hamster cage was a gaudy pile of interconnected and strangely shaped plastics in a variety of uncomplimentary colours.  So, it occurred to me that what I don't like is how very bold and ugly the cages are while at the same time remaining in largely boring shapes.  As an historian I've bemoaned the fact that we no longer make beautiful Victorian bird cages, but I've never heard of fancy looking cages for pet mice.  Well, I've never heard of or seen fancy cages for any animal these days.

And why is that?  They are made of plastic.  You could just as quickly mold them into any shape you wanted, complicated shapes being just as fast as boring shapes in the modern world of molds and factory production.  So, why don't we make them more interesting looking?  It's not like you can shove a giant cage away in an attic and not look at it.  So, why are we content with them looking the way they do?

I suppose all of this comes back to my longing for the world to be more beautiful, more interesting and more strange than it currently is.  I don't think I'm the only one who feels this way about large cages.  Even for fish tanks there are little columns and shipwreck things you can put at the bottom to make it look more interesting and piratey.  Why can't we do the same for mice?

I want my world to be filled with beautiful architectural shapes.  If I were designing a mouse cage I'd make it into a Greek temple, or a Moorish Palace.  I remember that cleaning out corners was particularly unpleasant, maybe I'd make a Roman Colosseum for my mice to live in.  Then I could name them all suitably impressive names and watch them manically run around in their wheels and pretend they were training for the gladiatorial Games.

Maximus would train ceaselessly while Claudius napped after a hard fight in the arena.  Arena just means sand in Latin by the way, not that sand is in any way recommended for mouse cages.  I simply got excited about the Latin.  Truly though, how can you get a fancy pet mouse and stick him in a boring square cage?  I think it would be much more fun to name your rex pet mouse Maximus and house him in something you don't hate looking at.  If I couldn't find a cool mouse cage I'd probably build him a Colosseum.  But then, I'm mad.  We all know this.

Anyway, if you happen to be looking for fancy pet mice and live anywhere near Rhode Island you should look no further.  And if you happen to find a cage that's actually interesting looking, do let me know.

Fill My Heart

Fill my heart with bird song, with leaves growing up reaching towards the light.  Fill my heart with green nurturing hopeful growth.  Nothing looks back in the garden.  Fill my heart with the sunlight filtered through leaves; the bright warmth of hopeful morning.

Shine light into the dark spaces so sadness cannot pool there.  Sing bird song to the recesses so that dark weighted words cannot dwell there.  Scatter darkness with warmth so that hate and sorrow have no foothold and only love can grow there.  Water the flowers so that the weeds cannot strangle them.  Fill my heart with the peace of a budding promise, that, like spring, brings hope to a garden.

On the wings of tiny cheeping birds fly the sad thoughts away.  Burn the darkness with the sun and reveal the hope for tomorrow.  Tend my heart with the care of a master gardener.