Saturday, April 04, 2009
 | I can't remember the first time iI used that phrase to describe my heart, but it was so perfect that it kinda stuck in my head. Maybe it was a journey vision. Maybe it was a piece of writing. I don't know. My heart holds the roadmap to those things that have caused me the most pain. Places where it was clumsily pasted together by the hand of a four year old. Places where it was stitched back together in some utilitarian manner so that I could quickly move on. Places that were awkwardly stapled back in place and had healed badly. Places that were hard because they had been superglued. As I have grown older, I have tried to take more care of how I pull the pieces back together. So now there are places with elegant silver looping designs and celtic inspired swirls. After all just because I am repairing it doesn't mean that it has to be ugly. However, under all those patch jobs my heart still bears the scars of each and every encounter. And seeing any place on that map I know immediately how that particular scar had come into being. It no longer hurt the way it did when those injuries were new, but those scars made my heart labor. They made it stiff and sometimes unyielding. They made me feel ugly at the very core of who I am. They made me feel like Frankenstein. This morning I sat down to begin yet another repair. This one long overdue. I carefully picked thru the basket of thread and selected gold for this piece of handiwork. I carefully laced the edges together and threw in some pearls as I stitched. I am after all a creature of the sea and a pearl reminds me that things that are beautiful sometimes take years to create. Remind me that something once abrasive can result in a glowing little piece of luminescent moonlight. As I finished and tied off the thread, I took a moment to hold that crazy patchworked heart in my hand. I just sighed. Would it always look so broken to me. Just then, a hand reached over my shoulder and took the heart out of my hands. I turned to find Mama holding my handiwork in her large and reassuring hands. I smiled and just shrugged my shoulders as if to say 'I'm doing the best that I can Mama'. She smiled back at me, handed me back my heart and I watched her as she walked away. Growing smaller and finally disappearing altogether. I turned back to the task at hand. But my heart was different somehow. As I look closer I could see that the stitches no longer sat on the surface, but had become part of the heart itself - like a tattoo across its surface. The hard places were no more. The clumsy sections now looked like Tori's beautiful refrigerator art. The functional patch jobs had been transformed into repeating tribal patterns. My fingers traced the glowing silver and golden filigree that looped and crossed the surface in sweeping patterns. As I did this, I became aware that something was missing. The scar tissue was gone. Mama had transformed my heart with all its repairs into a Faberge work of art. And with that thought it lurched back into motion with a steady, regular and strong rhythm all its own. |
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