Keeping our hearts open anyway

It started with a sprig of purple sage, growing on a plentiful bush on the curb opposite the house I was walking by. A couple of pieces of blue-hued lavender later, the plan began to formulate: I’d add a few more blossoms, a couple of feathery weeds, a piece of greenery or two. When I got home I’d photograph it in my hand, text it to my friend who was having a rough week, and say, “good morning. These are for you.”

I made sure only to pluck what was growing either wild or in obvious plentitude, where one sprig wouldn’t be missed. I only picked stuff from the curb between sidewalk and street, never reaching over a fence or onto a lawn and pulling things up from an actual yard.

The purples and whites I had so far were good, if a little monochromatic. I needed some yellow now and, if I was lucky, maybe I’d find something orange or red. My excitement grew with each find.

A bloom too far

The sun now backlit a low bush full of pale pink blooms that pulled me in like a tractor beam. Before I could stop myself, I plucked one: the perfect finishing touch to the bouquet.

The person walking toward me at that exact moment—a gorgeously gender-neutral elder with long silver hair, wearing a protest t-shirt and walking a direwolf—eyed the nosegay in my right hand and started to say something.

Assuming they wanted to share in the joy of this lovely thing forming in my hand, I stopped. Paused my podcast. Listened.

“Thanks for picking my flowers, I didn’t like them anyway.”

“What? Really?” Me, scrambled, smiling, my inner little one hoping they were joking as a way of connecting, even as grownup me began to detect their disdain.

“No! People plant flowers because they like them, don’t they? Not so you can pick them. Plant your own!”

Before I could muster an explanation, assure them of my careful intentions and parameters around the mission, or think of a cheery comeback to quell their annoyance, they turned, kept going. Done with me.

I kept going too, but I wasn’t breathing anymore.

An arrow had flown into my solar plexus and nausea was beginning to blossom there. It folded me into a deeply familiar resignation that instantly emptied me of any desire to be in the world.

I was six years old. I did something wrong, got caught, got in trouble. My response in those moments had never been “eh, they’ll get over it, I’m having fun.” No, it was world-ending. Life-draining. It meant I lost my privileges as a resident of this planet.

And it was happening again.

The bouquet was now a lead weight in my hand. It was dirty. Contraband. Evidence of my guilt. I couldn’t bear to look at it, even to touch it.

Still, I finished it off with care—evened everything out, wound the longest stem around the others—and dropped the little bunch on the bottom step of a house. My friend wasn’t going to see it now, but maybe someone would find it and… no, it didn’t matter anymore. Those lines had been cut, the tank drained of goodwill. I didn’t care who found it, or what would happen to it.

“You broke my heart, human.”

Yes, my inner narrator was already beginning to form words, to write this very story. I let that voice speak on as another part of me, still vaguely present, tried to stay with the sensations.

The nauseous bloom where the arrow had entered formed into a denser ball and began moving upward. As it entered my heart it morphed from sickness to a deep ache, like a fist was squeezing it.

Slowly, it rose to my throat. The ache intensified. It floated up to the center of my head, hanging excruciatingly behind my eyes for a moment before exploding into not tears, but sensemaking.

Ohhh, the sensemaking.

First I tried (as maybe you are now) to dismiss this person as a joyless curmudgeon. It would have felt good to stop there in my reasoning: to pack the wound with blame and throw a bandage over it.

But I couldn’t.

For one thing, they weren’t wrong. In the effed up society we live in, we claim nature as property. We invest in it, we cultivate it, and by that logic, what I did—pick one of hundreds of blossoms on someone else’s prolific sidewalk plant—was theft. Ridiculous, yes, but it violated one of the arbitrary agreements we have as a society.

And on a deeper level, obviously this wasn’t about me at all. Nor was it about the flower. This person was also likely responding from a deep, young place in them—one, perhaps, that had had things taken from them, or suffered one too many boundary violations in their life. Their fear came out as anger at the person (me) who was violating them now.

The rational adult part of me knew all this. But the six year old—the one to whom getting in trouble feels like death—was very much in front in this experience.

This is what it is to be triggered.

And my god, it is happening all the time in this world. It happened to me (and to this person) when I was literally tra-la-laing down the goddamn street picking flowers on a sunny Tuesday afternoon.

What I was most aware of is how quickly an arrow can fly into an open heart. How often, how unintentionally, we are reactivating old wounds in one another.

I’d forgotten this. Having worked for so long to create and maintain spaces that are safe for hearts, my own hadn’t had an encounter like this in a while. I forgot how deathly awful it can feel.

The most radical thing we can do

Later that week a wise friend helped illuminate the biggest lesson this experience held for me: that keeping our hearts open is the most radical thing we can do right now. To stay connected with what is pure and loving in us. Tend to what’s alive in a world that is crumbling. Turn toward what is green and growing—and ya know, maybe gift it to each other once in a while.

In this case, I had been in touch for a few momements with a pure part of myself who wanted to make my friend happy. My actions challenged a brittle, dying system (“these are my plants, my property!”) that scared the other person who relied on that system to help them feel safe. And that, in turn, triggered me.

This will happen. Is happening. And it’s why keeping ourselves open and loving is so radical. With arrows flying everywhere, our instinctual responses might be to defend, to shame others into submission, to keep flinging arrows of our own.

What would it be to instead walk heart-first through this time of destruction and rebirth?

It’s not about stopping the arrows, or armoring ourselves against them, or having a quiver of clever comebacks to disarm the ‘attacker.’ It’s more about feeling the ache, letting it re-shape us, and then—most important and challenging—re-centering. Reconnecting to the bigger, deeper truths about ourselves and the world, and let ourselves be stabilized by that larger reality.

We can practice.

This is hard work, and we sure aren’t going to do it perfectly. I mean, learning aside, I straight-up collapsed in the face of someone else’s projected fear over one flower on the sidewalk. Obviously I’ve got work to do. We all do.

The only way to do the work is to practice. Practice staying in touch with the place where love resides in us. Practice recognizing our inner knowing, despite all the messages we’ve received that contradict it. Practice returning to this place center after we’ve been knocked off it.

We can do this in places and with people we know are safe—who will witness us in our wholeness and reflect it back to us.

A good martial arts dojo is a wonderful place to practice re-centering after being thrown off balance. Soul Writing groups strengthen your heart, your generosity, your seeing of others and yourself. Where else have you found?

What about you?

Do you have a sense of what activates old patterns in you, and how you respond? How have you come to recognize those patterns, make space for them? What practices do you have for re-centering yourself, for staying in contact with your loving self?

Please share your experiences in the comments. You can also explore it by setting a timer for 8 minutes and writing your response to the prompt:

“When the arrows fly…”