Sunday Morning

Posted on by Live & Learn

So much held in a heart in a lifetime. So much held in a heart in a day, an hour, a moment. We are utterly open with no one in the end—not mother and father, not wife or husband, not lover, not child, not friend. We open windows to each but we live alone in the house of the heart. Perhaps we must. Perhaps we could not bear to be so naked, for fear of a constantly harrowed heart. When young we think there will come one person who will savor and sustain us always; when we are older we know this is the dream of a child, that all hearts finally are bruised and scarred, scored and torn, repaired by time and will, patched by force of character, yet fragile and rickety forevermore, no matter how ferocious the defense and how many bricks you bring to the wall. You can brick up your heart as stout and tight and hard and cold and impregnable as you possibly can and down it comes in an instant, felled by a woman’s second glance, a child’s apple breath, the shatter of glass in the road, the words I have something to tell you, a cat with a broken spine dragging itself into the forest to die, the brush of your mother’s papery ancient hand in the thicket of your hair, the memory of your father’s voice early in the morning echoing from the kitchen where he is making pancakes for his children.

~ Brian Doyle, from “Joyas Voladoras”

Photo via Your Eyes Blaze Out

32 thoughts on “Sunday Morning”

  4. You started the week with Back to Reality. This is as real as it gets.
    Enough really though, please!

    Also, reading this one here, I couldn’t stop thinking of your father-in-law from your post yesterday. His heart ❤

  6. This is so beautiful. Our hearts go through so many challenges over the years. Some do decide to brick it up for self-protection, but really, they are also denying themselves from living joy as well, aren’t they? And in the end something, from that list, or other, will come in and break their way through…

  11. Profound truth…will try to reply tomorrow as I think of respiration, the interconnection between the thoughts of the mind, actions, the heart, interpretation of experience, reality and consciousness. I also think of echos of life and the capacity of the boundless heart…

  13. Having attended a funeral last week and watched the intricate dance of family in that exquisite moment of crisis, this shimmering passage struck me squarely in the solar plexus. The patterns that are ingrained in our history, the relationships we take for granted, the allowances we make for the foibles of family interactions so deeply entrenched, it all came at me with this post. No words, truly….

  15. I could – only just about – ‘like’ the comments, have so many tears in my eyes – this is ever so poignant, beautifully written and felt, so deep and touching – and the ‘innocent’ pure and most beautiful ‘illustration’ – they all did me in….

  16. Some people write things that make you realize: something you felt deep inside yourself and never brought to light but wondered if you were the only one who felt it, is actually a universal experience. Such people are what I would measure as the lights of the world, because they inform us that we are not alone, that we are so much more alike than we are different, and that we are all in this together, even if we can’t quite bring ourselves to behave accordingly, usually because of the fear he alludes to in this quote. A wonderful post David!

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