Repairing the Heart Song
May 26, 2025
I spent the last few days in northern New Mexico, tucked into a sea of sage brush and juniper and the occasional piñon pine jutting out from the horizon. I was visiting a dear friend who has become family, and for that, and the opportunity to spend time together beneath the open desert sky, I am grateful. We sat beneath an ancient tree and hiked across volcanic rock. We saw tiny hummingbirds flying with their big, big hearts and watched three gigantic vultures playing beautifully in the wind. We shared meals and laughter. I shared gratitude to the day and to the birds as they flew by. I had arrived crowded with hardness and noise and left with a sense of settled softness that felt good and real and true.
Any time I am able to be in quietude, where there is little between me and the big earth and sky, is a gift that I cherish deeply, a gift that I savor from the heart. As I grow older, I am learning more and more how to bear life — in all of its beauty and its pain, in all of its potential and loss. And being with the earth and my dear friend these past few days taught me this: it’s important to be with those who remembers us. Those who can see our heart and our spirit. Who see us deeply and with love, and who respect us and treat us with dignity and kindness. And when I say those who remember us, I mean those who can remind us of the forgotten and exiled parts of ourselves that so desperately need to be seen, recalled, and brought back into the fabric of our being, with love. So that we can remember ourselves. So that we can remember who we are and all that we are a part of.
I’ve spent a lot of my life living only a tiny sliver of myself because the people around me needed me to be small. I’ve spent a lot of my life trying to survive systems and people who had power over me, and with that power demanded that I carry what they couldn’t, hold the blame for what they wouldn’t, and act as if what was happening weren’t so. I know I am not alone. We see these dynamics and abuses of power everyday, in our families and work places to the people and militaries trying to dominate the entire planet. Many of us were raised to fear and shrink ourselves, and grew in the reflection of those who could not see us clearly because of the distortion of their own pain and judgement and wound. And many of us continue to find ourselves in places where we are rarely, if ever, seen in all of our gifts and vulnerabilities, in all of our complexity and need, in all of our strengths. This kind of experience is its own wound, and creates a particular kind of fracture, pain, and isolation. One that ripples and breaks us along our path, making it hard to see ourselves clearly and to know ourselves with love.
Being a living being with all of the wounding that life can bring is made more possible when we are graced with the softness of presence that comes from those who can see us. Not from the eyes, but from the heart. I cherish the sage brush and the sky because I can feel how they expand me and fill me with the preciousness of my own life. This feeling fills me with something new. It grows me in a different direction. It grows me closer to the earth, which grows me closer to my self. And in that reconnection, something lost returns. The fractures within me repair. The heart song of my being is returned in all her parts. I can sing again in the fullness of my own harmony and vibration. No longer shrunken or made dull, but full and bright again. Wild and alive. I remember myself back into alignment with all that I am and all that I am a part of. And all that I am a part of is remembered again, too. Is made more full and bright and wild and alive again — the hummingbirds and the vultures, the sage brush and the wind.
In these times of change and instability, when the abuses of power are plenty and the pain is too often and too big to bear, may we find our way to those who can remember us, who can offer us a deep sense of welcome back, welcome home. And may we remember enough to (re)turn to the earth and the sky. To approach these great and ancient beings with gratitude and reciprocity, and see and remember them, as they see and remember us.
Written and shared with love.
- mai