Vulnerability Destroyed My Reputation and Opened My Heart To Love
Forget safety.
Live where you fear to live.
Destroy your reputation.
Be notorious.
— Rumi, from Goodreads
Standing beside my dear friend, Lynn, as she paid for her medical marijuana in the local pot store, Rumi’s words came crashing in on me the way an asteroid once careened from billions of light years away, passing through untold galaxies, and landed squarely on Earth, taking out the dinosaurs and altering the course of evolution.
Wham! An explosion of Love struck me right there in the pot store, catapulting me out of my ordinary sense of separation into the awareness that we are one, all is love, and love is all there is. Although I’m not one to hide my feelings, on this day the event opened my heart such that I barely had time to drag my disheveled self to the car before a deluge of tears rained down.
Hearing this tale, you’d be right to question if I was stoned. But ask anyone who knows me, and they’ll tell you I’m not much into weed.
In hindsight, I believe the event was a synchronicity of life circumstances falling into alignment to shatter illusions I had about myself, illusions of comfort and safety, and to destroy what was left of my reputation. Whatever the case may be, there in that rural pot shop, I was struck mad with Love.
Tears flowed for days — I was in a puddle of ruin.
Rumi is quoted often, and I am among those who do the quoting. Still, his is a twilight language. Although I’ve told myself I understand his words, I’m beginning to realize (in my sixtieth year) that all my understanding has been an armor to shield me from the very Love of which Rumi longingly spoke.
While I’ve been quoting Rumi, I’ve been blissfully unaware that I was playing with fire. It was only a matter of time before all that ruminating on Rumi would catch up with me, and I would have to live his meaning.
Life, being no respecter of persons, will deliver us a blow — or several — that will inevitably drop us to our knees. If the fall doesn’t take us out, with any luck our need for comfort, demands for safety and our reputation will be destroyed so that all that will remain is Love.
My nerves were a hot mess, and my soul was screaming at me, “Destroy your reputation!”
The winter before this pot store incident my dear friend, Lynn, was suffering from nervous system issues after a total knee replacement surgery. I was living in coastal Maine at the time. She and her husband were living on their organic farm along a glacial river in the Pacific Northwest. We talked on the phone regularly. After the surgery, I noticed she was growing despondent and worried. She was becoming weepier, and not her usual clear-headed, can-do, earth-mama self. She was no longer driving a car or working on her farm. She had to use a walker. She was managing pain with dangerous pharmaceutical meds (completely unlike her), and having to navigate the rabbit warren that is the medical establishment as she chased the pain from one test and dead-end diagnoses to another. She and her husband sounded angry, confused, and sleep deprived. They asked if I would come and help.
I wasn’t altogether “myself” at the time, either. I’d spent the previous eight months in a prestigious but high-stress job. My nerves were a hot mess, I was miserable, and my soul was screaming at me, “Destroy your reputation!” I had enthusiastically taken the job, but it was every shade of wrong! I could find no deep meaning in it, nor any explanation other than life is just messy, and breaking up is hard to do.
I gave in to my inner demand and resigned from my job without the prospect of a new one. Then I called my friends and said, “I’m on my way.” As soon as I was able to pack a suitcase, I booked a flight and left Maine and my husband behind at the airport.
When I boarded that plane, I was officially a nomad, no forwarding address, and no plan other than to help my friends.
That was seven months ago.
‘Broken dishes’, broken parts,
Streets are filled with broken hearts
Broken words never meant to be spoken,
Everything is broken.
— Bob Dylan[1]
When I arrived at my friends’ home, I had to meet them in the middle of where they were, in pain, and in the absence of any clear diagnosis, in fear from a whole lot of uncertainty about what was happening and why.
The circumstance forced me to witness their experience, remain present to what is real (rather than imagined), not try to fix anything, and just be good company. To do this, I had to feel my own pain and the discomfort of not having a solution or a guarantee that everything would work out fine for any of us.
There have been doctor visits, hours spent researching symptoms and remedies, discovering the medicine of CBD, talking, laughing, crying, napping, playing music (lots of music), dancing, reading, gardening, eating organic food — and did I mention crying?
It was the badass Brené Brown who said in one of her books[2] that vulnerability is …uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure…it sounds like truth and feels like courage.
Who knew that simply helping friends navigate the real stuff of life at a time when I was no longer too busy to, would force me into real vulnerability, and peel away another layer of self-importance and identity that buffered me from profound human connection, and the Love of which Rumi spoke.
None of us know if life’s blows will leave us permanently damaged or disabled, or if any one of these will lead to our unplanned end. What we can know, however, is that when life’s blows break things (because that’s the nature of things), it will fuck with our plans, and we may never be the same. Our hearts will break a little each time, and there’s a chance our hearts will break open and never close.
As my friends and I lived with things we feared, no reputation to uphold, and all our “prudent planning” so much flotsam and jetsam, our hearts were opened to Love, smack-dab in the messy middle of all the broken things.
