The future is a broken heart. A spot is reserved for yours.
I've been so taken with something I heard on the podcast Love in a Fucked Up World, Dean Spade's conversation with Eli Clare. Eli suggested we consider how "to live with a broken heart is a long haul condition of these times."
I've been thinking about broken hearts—mine, yours, ours— for a long time. Longer than I realized until I went looking through the LoveYou2 blog.
The earliest version of this idea I can find on the blog is from 2011: what is interesting about a broken heart is it has much more surface area — more possibility for being touched by love and more space from which to radiate love.
I said a version of it in my TEDx talk in 2014, "A broken heart has much more surface area for radiating and receiving love."
And in 2021 I wrote a whole list of things to do with a broken heart: collect the pieces. count them. marvel at the surface area. mind the sharp edges.
Back in 2011, I was wondering about Rumi's "polish your heart": Do the sorrows leave marks, heartbreaks lines, and the expansions stretch marks?
The details of heartbreak and how our hearts work in relation to each other has been a keen interest of mine.
Eli Clare's framing adds another approach to consider. I've been considering the broken heart as an event or phase — something that happens, cracks you open, and then (if you're lucky, if you're paying attention) enlarges your capacity to love. What Eli is naming is different. It's not a one-time event; it's the condition, it's the weather if you will. It's what we're living inside, together, right now.
If broken-heartedness is a long-haul condition (and what other way is there to respond to these times other than having your heart broken over and over again), then the question becomes how do we tend to ourselves and each other. How do we cultivate relating with broken hearts or with a broken-heartedness? From this place, broken open and surface-area-rich, we can build the world we're imagining.
Cheryl Strayed wrote: be brave enough to break your own heart. I've wondered about that line for years — the voluntary version, the one you choose. But most of the time we don't choose heartbreak, rather heartbreak arrives without notice.
I suppose LoveYou2 has been about searching for those ways to tend in the present: the love notes, the altars, the Things to Do With a Broken Heart. All of it an attempt to make the tending visible, to make it social, to refuse to do it alone.
How will you welcome a brokenheart? How will you tend to it?