Broken
Hearts
“I’ll
take this red ribbon
Stitch
my heart together
It
will heal, given time.
It
beats a strange rhythm,
But
I’ll still go on living
When
I don’t get it right…”
Madilyn
Bailey (from “Red Ribbon”)
There
is a beautiful video of Madilyn Bailey singing this song with the chorus of Public
School 22 in New York. It is so beautiful, I cried. I hope you will search for
it and take a listen. It’s not so much the song—it is about a romantic break-up
and the resulting broken heart. We’ve all been there, haven’t we? The magic is
in watching the kids in the background. They feel the music and cannot help moving
to it even though they are seated in old, wooden, screwed-to-the-floor, auditorium
seats I remember from the 1950’s.
There
are a couple of lines in this song, “Red Ribbon,” that I especially resonate
with. One is, “The heart that’s been broken is a heart that’s been loved.”
It reminds me of once hearing Scott Peck (The Road Less Traveled) say
that only a broken heart has the space within it to love greatly. There is
something about having one’s heart broken by love that produces maturity, even
in children. It’s one of those Necessary Losses that psychologist Judith
Viorst wrote a whole book about. Life dishes up some grief, but also so much
joy. We are almost always willing to risk getting our hearts broken if it is
the result of loving deeply. At least, I hope we are.
The
other line that struck a chord in me was this: “But I’ll still go on living
when I don’t get it right…” It’s a good thing to remember that broken
hearts are a product of living a real life. We certainly don’t go searching for
the experience, but when it happens, we do live through it. And we live through
it with bigger, more generous, and open hearts, because broken hearts do “heal,
given time.” There’s a lot of grief right now. Reach out virtually and give
someone a red ribbon.
In
the Spirit,
Jane
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