Trembling heart
Posted on | May 22, 2007 |
Sometimes my heart feels like a starfish belly: outside me, devouring the things I love. Sometimes it feels like an urchin’s purple back: a hundred quills around its pliant center. Sometimes it’s like the soft belly of a cat: turning to the sunlight, thrumming with internal delight. Sometimes it’s hard to have a heart this tender, this wide open to other people’s grief.
At work we’re just finally now sorting through the relics of trauma that we’ve carried like splinters through the school year. I’m more okay than many others, in part, because I was new there, and also because I am young and resilient. The middle kid in my family. The peace maker. The relativist who can see both sides, while still seeing the cup half full. I wasn’t rooted, familiar with the way ‘things always were.’ The lives lost weren’t ones I knew.
And yet, oh and yet, it is so very hard for me to sit in a room with everyone’s emotions running high like floodwaters, just below the surface of their pale blue veins. So hard to see their faces hurt, to see the different sides, to see the grief and feel it all. I try to envision a protective shield to stop some of it from saturating, but the sorrow and loss and anger that fills the building, and eddies as two people pass in the halls, is so present, so tangible, I can’t shake it off. I am devastated, still. And then I read in the paper about the little girl in Portugal, abducted from her hotel room, or about sweet|salty’s beautiful tiny premie boys and my heart feels pulpy and fragile and broken open all over again, as if sorrow were a new ingredient in air.
I came home exhausted today. I think I’ve come home exhausted all year. I thought I was the only one, but in the past two days of meetings, everyone says they’ve been ungodly tired, sleepwalking through the days. Someone said it was like we were trying to fix four flats on a car with the car still moving. And it has really been like that, post trauma, moving full throttle forward because of the wide eyed kids who want to learn about the arctic and the desert and addition and how to spell the word miss-iss-ipp-i.
Then I stumbled on this:
I will not die an unlived life.
I will not live in fear of falling or catching fire.
I choose to inhabit my days, to allow my living to open me, to make me less afraid, more accessible, to loosen my heart until it becomes a wing, a torch, a promise.
I choose to risk my significance, to live so that which came to me as seed goes on to the next as blossom, and so that which came to me as blossom goes on as fruit.
Dawna Markova
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15 Responses to “Trembling heart”
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May 23rd, 2007 @ 12:03 am
Beautiful.
May 23rd, 2007 @ 1:52 am
*goosebumps*
May 23rd, 2007 @ 8:22 am
I love that poem - just the other day I had to take it off my bathroom mirror, and I thought about how much I didn’t want to forget those words.
Here’s hoping that this summer will give your soul time to really rest, to thrive in the sunshine, to heal a little more.
May 23rd, 2007 @ 8:23 am
I love that poem - just the other day I had to take it off my bathroom mirror, and I thought about how much I didn’t want to forget those words.
Here’s hoping that this summer will give your soul time to really rest, to thrive in the sunshine, to heal a little more.
May 23rd, 2007 @ 10:11 am
I’ve been thinking about the events you experienced at the beginning of the school year, wondered how that was being dealt with at the end of the school year. Reading old posts, you were really thriving in those early years of Bean, and I keep hoping you can find balance in your return to work.
I was talking to one of my colleagues the other day about how the students we teach at our high school don’t really remember a world pre-9/11. They were so young at that point that so much of their consciousness relates to post-9/11. And your experiences with this school have always been post-trauma, something that happened as you were just introduced to the school.
My heart goes out to you and your colleagues. So difficult to deal with so great a loss, so great an intrusion on a place that should be safe. Every day, you are there for those kids, and that is admirable.
May 23rd, 2007 @ 12:37 pm
not only do you tell your story so beautifully, but you feel it beautifully, and sometimes beautifully hard. i hope for peace for you all as you wade through this tragic part of the journey. thoughts are with you.
May 24th, 2007 @ 4:26 am
hi!
I forget exactly how i stumbled across your blog - maybe via insearchofdessert via tianmao, but i have to say, you take some amazing photographs. I just spent like 15 minutes browsing through your flickr, admiring the composition and the way you make even average, mundane things seem infinitely interesting.
Your blog, too, is very engrossing - i like the shot you put on the entry “wishing on dandelions” and i had to laugh at the one about the “rules for the urinal” because let me tell you, i’m a dude, but still, every time i step into the men’s room, I think exactly the same thing as you - did no one teach ya’ll how to aim!!? *laughs*
then again, if you think that’s bad, pray you never come to japan. you haven’t seen the true depths of misery to which bad bathroom aim can plunge one until you try to use a ghetto squat toilet in the bowels of one of a busy tokyo train station. *shuddertothink*
May 24th, 2007 @ 5:14 am
oh christina, what a year you have had. The way that you process it with so much sensitivity and awareness and gentleness is an inspiration to us all. Here’s wishing you a summer of sweetness, rest and long winding days filled with all you love best.
May 24th, 2007 @ 7:17 am
Thank you. Your post gave my day wings of courage.
May 24th, 2007 @ 7:54 am
*sigh* The end of the school year hits like a ton of bricks. My shoulders ache just reading your post. My prayer for you and your school is a peaceful, healing summer. Take courage; your heart is as strong as it is soft.
May 25th, 2007 @ 1:36 pm
I just saw this post today and yet it felt like you guessed what my soul would need to hear at this precise moment. I thought I was crazy to think that this past year feels like a never-ending “transition” phase. Everything so inconstant and unsettled around me. The feeling of being so fragile yet so strong and capable. I’m glad I’m not the only one who feels that way.
May 26th, 2007 @ 7:28 pm
I never know how to comment on your posts.
I love you though, and your site.
May 27th, 2007 @ 7:07 pm
Your gentle way of dealing with the traumas in life is inspirational. I am a retired teacher and know that it was easier those days, more optimistic and many children excited by the world opening out to them.
Here’s a blessing I posted this week:
Go with the strength you have.
Go simply,
lightly,
gently,
in search of love,
and the Spirit go with you.
May 27th, 2007 @ 7:07 pm
Your gentle way of dealing with the traumas in life is inspirational. I am a retired teacher and know that it was easier those days, more optimistic and many children excited by the world opening out to them.
Here’s a blessing I posted this week:
Go with the strength you have.
Go simply,
lightly,
gently,
in search of love,
and the Spirit go with you.
May 27th, 2007 @ 7:07 pm
Your gentle way of dealing with the traumas in life is inspirational. I am a retired teacher and know that it was easier those days, more optimistic and many children excited by the world opening out to them.
Here’s a blessing I posted this week:
Go with the strength you have.
Go simply,
lightly,
gently,
in search of love,
and the Spirit go with you.