Cracked Heart

I wanted to drive down to the water at Tulalip Bay in Washington but I couldn’t get to the beach since it was the private property of the indigenous folks.  I wanted to step outside of the car and see the water, so I pulled up on to a hillside where there was a graveyard.  It was slightly reminiscent of the graveyard where my parents and brothers are buried except for this one was more green, and the Beaver Dam graveyard was quite arid with fields of wheat that rolled in the breeze.  I could remember the smell of the dusty sweet wheat being dried by the sun mixing with country pasture air with flies buzzing about.

The last winter had been tough for me because I was at a passage in my life where I had to deal with old unresolved and traumatic childhood issues.  I had been going through an unveiling of sorts where after coming in to some truths; it felt that so much of the way I had been experiencing life had been lies.  I had given many things a negative skew and then overcompensated as I could by being overly cheerful and a people pleaser.  So much of how I had moved through life seemed artificial and I was in the beginning stages of the process of reconstructing myself with all of my new discoveries.

The relationship I’d had with my parents was a bit strained.  I tried to be a good Mormon girl and it was I who started to say “I love you” to them first.  It was because I remember hearing that I should do that when I was in primary school at church.  My growing years as I tried to figure myself out had struggles as I knew I couldn’t be Mormon, I was bisexual, and I had to deal with my complicated sense of self (dissociative identity disorder).  These issues gave me struggles in my parental relationships.  My father died of cancer at my current age, and my mother died in 2000 as I was headed back to graduate school.

I was recalling a past visit to my mother’s grave.  You see, some time previously, a friend had given me a heart shaped sugilite stone in which the bluish color changes with wear and environment.  It had started to create a white glow in the center when I lost it gardening one year.  The next year after a hard winter I had been double-digging my garden and washing off the patio with high pressure; I saw a bluish glisten.  It was the stone that had been re-found.  The white center had widened and expanded throughout the stone.  The heart had returned in a different form.  When I visited my mother’s grave, I opened the earth above her body and pushed the stone in with a prayer that life brings renewal, transformation, return of different form.

Many of the graves in Tulalip also had various tokens and mementos.  I stepped from graveside to graveside in contemplation.  When I walked towards my car along the road, I stumbled on something so I glanced down.    There was a red glass heart under my shoe.  My immediate response was, “Oh I need to return this to the graveside, but whose is it?”  I could feel a common spirit in the wind as though voices from the graves were telling me that it was mine.  I accepted it.  As I looked at it closer, I could see a crack in the heart where the light was shining through.  Rumi says, "The wound is the place where the light enters you."