Wait for the Stars

The dark has fallen, 

But wait for the stars.

The darkness may be deepening, 

But wait for the stars.

Even if the clouds pour rain upon you,

They must soon pass, so wait,

Wait for the stars.

I know you fear the darkness you have already seen,

But this is not an endless nightmare.

Wait for the stars.

You are haunted by the dark of broken dreams,

But this is only the nighttime, 

Wait for the stars.

No matter how dark it is,

Or how dark it was,

There is always hope, 

Even if it is very small and very far away.

Even if it is only one faint star in the whole of the sky.

Do not let the darkness overwhelm you,

One star will always bring more.

Just wait.

Please wait.

Wait for the stars.

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Rest Gently Shadow my boy.  One day I will see you again in the stars.  Til then I will wait for grief to pass slowly like the nighttime.  I will trust in the stars even when I cannot see them.  Soon, soon one will shine and the light will increase and slowly the grief will fade.  

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.

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.

Stars in the Darkness

The stars had fallen, but some of them so slowly that nobody realized they were falling until it was too dark to see anymore.  The dark, gem-black of the sky had once been pierced by the bright lights of stars.  Or so the passerby who saw it years ago have told me.  Lately the sky felt dark and stormy.  The few stars left were so lonely they almost felt out of place.  I had been staring into the blackness so long that the missing stars didn't strike me as unusual.

Photo via Flickr by Kristin Jona 

So many years ago that it felt like a dream, I had watched the first star fall and mourned it's precipitous descent.  I held it in my hands, cradling that dying dream.  And then I laid it to rest beneath the protective limbs of a tree; on a hill where it could still see the sky.  I didn't want it to feel as alone as I felt.

As I lived through some dark times the stars kept falling.  I stopped noticing their fall.  It somehow felt natural now that the light would slowly be extinguished and the dreams would fade.  The blackness felt inevitable.  The time when the sky was full of stars and the world still had a hopeful light was so far away it felt like I'd imagined it in dreams of a better time that never was.  A time that could never be again.

Photo via Flickr by Stephen Rahn 

How long have I occupied this lonely hill with my fallen dreams alone?  Who can say?  I sit here in the dark, keeping my sorrowful, personal vigil.  I no longer mourn the stars sprinkled around my feet.  I thought it was only a matter of time til they fell.  I was so wrapped up in the emotion of the darkness that I didn't stop to ask why they were falling; all I knew was that I couldn't stop it.  My despair was as large as the sky, crushing and endless.

Then, suddenly, the night was different.  I realized in a moment that I wasn't as alone as I thought.  The warmth of friendship can be as shocking and illuminating as summer lightning.  A figure in the darkness, a friend, stopped and sat with me to share my dark inner vigil.  I was not surprised by their presence but I hadn't expected them to stop and sit with me in the dark.

Without so much as a word they glanced at the sky and then down at the piles of fallen stars.  I felt their sadness at the state of my night sky.  Seeing it through their eyes I could now see how empty and dark the sky felt with its bright dreams lacking.  I had no words to offer back to them about the state of things.  I had only silence and pain to offer.

Photo via Flickr by Martin Fisch

My silence didn't scare them.  We sat in quiet stillness surveying the darkness for some time.  Then gently they started collecting up my fallen stars, gathering up my darkened dreams, stacking my broken hopes up tenderly.  I asked what they were doing.  "We are going to put your dreams back up in the sky where they belong" they said.
"But, they are dark, they have lost their fire" I said.
"So, we will light them again."
"How will we do that?" I asked with a doubtful hope beginning to flicker in my chest.
"With love" they said and they reached out.
I held out an upturned hand to them.  Gently, into my palm, they placed a single dark star.

I looked down at one lonely broken dream and it felt heavier and heavier in my hand.  I cradled it with  both hands crying.  Gently they added their hands to mine to help still their shaking.  When I finished mourning the brokenness of my dream they closed my fingers around the star and added their hands around mine.  With four hands supporting my dream they said with the firmest gentleness "With love" and together with hearts open we re-lit my dream.

Original photo via Flickr by Leland Francisco

Tears now sparkled with light as they helped me release my rekindled dream into the sky.  It floated higher and higher until it joined it's few remaining star brethren and made them just a little bit brighter again.  And with the joy that followed, the love, friendship and hope flowed out of my heart and re-lit all the stars at my feet.

Photo via Flickr by Nic Redhead

As suddenly as my first star had fallen I was relighting my dreams and we were throwing them back up into the sky.  Lanterns lit with love and hope they floated upwards.  Being surrounded by brightly lit dreams is beautiful and magical.

Photo via Flickr by Jirka Matousek

With stars streaming upwards around us, I looked at my friend.  They smiled, "You deserve it," they said.

I smiled, my heart as bright as the stars.

We painted the night with dreams and light.

Photo via Flickr by Judy Schmidt

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Photo via Flickr by NASA Goddard Space Flight Center

With love to all the friends who have helped me stumble through the darkness and have with the gentlest most insistent love helped me rekindle my dreams.

Words rarely express the depths of emotion we want them to.  This is my attempt to express some of my gratefulness to those who have walked beside me through the dark.

I wouldn't be here without you.  You have helped light my darkness.

I hope that I can be even a small source of light for you in return.



My dreams are as vast as the sky, bright and limitless.

Photo via Flickr by Alessandro Caproni