Heart

 

It is Valentine’s Day. A cold morning. I sit at the window and look out at the rooftops and the car covered in snow. The bare trees stand motionless against the flat grey sky. Silence, stillness, shelter are among winter’s lessons.

The holiday evokes Eros, and I ponder Russell Lockhart’s words “Eros means telling,” which leads, he says, to the suffering of relationship. Eros is bittersweet, writes Anne Carson; or even, rather, the “sweetbitter” of Shappo’s poem that Carson quotes, noting how here the bitter follows the sweet. Eros as the god of love, as the principle of relatedness, unmasks us and makes us vulnerable. As a counterpart to logos it balances reason with feeling.

From Russell Lockhart I learn of the relation between “courage” and the Latin word “cor” meaning heart. Both can be broken.

From where I sit the naked branches intersect to form an imperfect mandala through which I watch the swell of light.

“My story is my truth,” wrote Jung.

My memoir is a written testament of my life, no longer mine and always mine.  “The endless transformations of the individuation process include the way we meet and endure the unbearable,” I wrote.

I defend my love for my husband and his love for me and the ethics of that love and of its beginning as the truth of my heart and soul.

What do you defend? And why?

The courage of memoir, I believe, is the courage to suffer the judgments and projections of one’s readers, sometimes in silence. Sometimes not.