Caring For A Hurting Heart…

Conversations with people about events unfolding this past week and heart-breaking videos of devastation remind me of the critical importance of tending to our hurting hearts.

For if your heart is affected, it means your capacity for love and compassion is a light needed in the world.

So, before, during, and after you make choices about how to be of service for the highest good of all, take a moment to tend to your heart. A heart filled with love and compassion can give us the strength to move forward moment by moment through these unprecedented days in our country and world.

What helps restore faith, hope, and courage in your heart? Is there a favorite story of kindness and courage you can revisit or explore? Can you find a quote, poem, or message from a spiritual leader to remind you of your capacity to honor your feels about the suffering in the world while still welcoming in joy? Or, how about spending time in nature’s healing presence? Choices abound. We just need to make taking the time to tend to our heart a priority.

May you be blessed with an awareness of how much positive impact you can have in this world with a strong and tender heart bearing witness to what is unfolding and moving forward with love and compassion anyway.

Keep Going…

“That though the heart is breaking, happiness can exist in a moment, also. And because the moment in which we live is all the time there really is, we can keep going.”

―Zora Neale Hurston

A Prayer For These Times

To look inhumanity in the face, Lord,
Is to know it madness can take hold of me.
May I never forget this, Lord, in false hope
Or a too-great reliance on my shaky power.
May I have the courage, dignity, peace, and passion,
In spite of everything in me and the world,
To stay human.

― Andrew Harvey, inspired by Etty Hillesum and featured in his book, Light the Flame: 365 Days of Prayer.

Blessing for a Whole Heart

You think
if you could just
imagine it,
that would be a beginning;
that if you could envision
what it would look like,
that would be a step
toward a heart
made whole.

This blessing
is for when
you cannot imagine.
This is for when
it is difficult to dream
of what could lie beyond
the fracture, the rupture,
the cleaving through which
has come a life
you do not recognize
as your own.

When all that inhabits you
feels foreign,
your heart made strange
and beating a broken
and unfamiliar cadence,
let there come
a word of solace,
a voice that speaks
into the shattering,

reminding you
that who you are
is here,
every shard
somehow holding
the whole of you
that you cannot see
but is taking shape
even now,
piece joining to piece
in an ancient,
remembered rhythm

that bears you
not toward restoration,
not toward return—
as if you could somehow
become unchanged—
but steadily deeper
into the heart of the one
who has already dreamed you
complete.

― Jan Richardson, The Cure for Sorrow: A Book of Blessings for Times of Grief