Happy Post-Valentine's Day

Someone recently said "There is nothing as whole as a broken heart." I believe this is a quote from a Rabbi whose name I immediately forgot. Thinking about it this morning, and worrying about a friend in the throws of a torrid and complicated love affair, I wondered about the source of the purity of that statement. It seems to speak of what it means to be "poor in spirit," if I may be permitted to blend broadly divergent Abrahamic traditions.

I was remembering how it felt to be in the enchantment of love, the feeling of becoming a better self, a self wealthy in essences far more than my own, bathed in the light of and the allure of the powers of another beautiful soul. I was one, then I was two. That is the glow of a certain kind of romance, a kind of enchantment that feels heavenly until the light of that other soul seeks to wander away on its own accord, leaving us to roast in the hell of our attachments and resentments.

It's a trap we find our way out of when we turn to renounce that finery of the light of another's beam, when, for the sake of bearing only what is truly ours, we find ourselves wealthy in our poverty, the poverty of being just ourselves, with treasure lost, and ambition anulled. Solid ground, common ground, motherland, underfoot. The Truth never wanders away.