The Break/ing/down

"To be a spiritual warrior, one must have a broken heart; without a broken heart and the sense of tenderness and vulnerability, your warriorship is untrustworthy." – Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche


Well, my heart is broken. I broke it, and then everyone and everything followed suit. I think I have been breaking it my whole life, or maybe, others broke it first, and then I picked up a carving knife and made sure it never healed. The final break happened last summer, last fall, last winter. A series of events, betrayals of the most egregious kind, culminated in a real old fashioned proper breakdown.

A man, a system, and of course, my self betrayed me, and everything changed: who I thought I was, what I believed about our legal system here in the US of A, but most importantly, my sense of safety in our world- my naiveté that justice always won out eventually, that I could always tell good from bad, that people naturally gravitated towards doing what is right in the end.

I thought after all this breaking there was nothing left to heal. I'm not convinced otherwise yet. But I thought if I do decide to leave this world, I should write about it - tell a few others, if it would help. But there's no real way to prepare oneself to be broken. It's not something you'd ever really think could happen, let alone expect. That's the whole point about losing everything all at once, including your very self, it's not something we can conceive of until it happens.

So, I'll put this out there. I go back to court on June 11th, probably for the last time. It's my expectation that nothing will change. This seems to be the only way this lesson comes - hard and brutal, no letting up, no grace.

Big Sur

Big Sur, my favorite place. It moves me in a way I cannot describe, foreboding yet intensely beautiful and complex. I am awed by it. This kind of beauty awakens me, forces me to the present moment, and floods me with gratitude for that moment of being alive.