Blog
Wholehearted
On today’s walk in my neighborhood I heard Janis Joplin’s Piece of My Heart. It was coming from a house where a man on the front porch was doing some physical labor. I’m sure that most of you know the famous lyrics, in which she commands, in desperate pain, that her lover–and implicitly we listeners–take pieces of her heart, little ones. When we give little pieces of our hearts, we likely feel that someone is indeed taking them–pulling them out in an emotionally gruesome extraction. Piece by piece we deaden ourselves, we bloody our love. Both the taker and the one whose heart is being eliminated piece by piece.
The taker receives a heart in pieces, a broken heart and only bits of love, while the one whose heart is violated through bit by bit removal is giving nothing. Both individuals are tortured, and both are torturers. Both exist in an agony of diminishment, a loveless condition–because love (perhaps I should write Love or LOVE) is wholeheartedness. In love/LOVE, a person gives wholeheartedly. A Buddhist would likely call such love, such giving, metta, which is selfless love or love without self-interest. That ideal can serve as guidance for practical applications. Wholeheartedness–it’s a practice.
I wrote a couple of weeks ago, in my journal, that I wanted a whole-hearted love with my husband. I have been studying, and musing, over the idea of whole-hearted living/loving and then I come here to read that you are thinking about the same things.
Synchronicity.
How have you been?