We spend our lives trying to focus our passing on some illusion of permanence and stability. We make plans, we make vows, we support the flow of uncertainty with habits and routines that give us the comforting dream of predictability and control, and then we find ourselves repeatedly on our knees in surrender to powers and events far greater than ourselves. In those moments, kneeling in the pool of the unknown, the heart opens and allows life – life itself, not the simulacrum of life from control – to run.
The way to live with this violation of production is that of the creator Tina Davidson it checks all his memory Let Your Heart Break: Life and Music from a Classical Composer (public library) — a vocal reckoning and what it takes to compose a life of encounter and beauty without broken pieces and broken stories.
He recounts attending a talk by Stephen Levine – a poet and writer best known for his work on death and dying – where a member of the audience asked what the meaning of life was. Acknowledging the magnitude of the question, Levine paused, then offered: “I think the purpose of life is to let your heart break.” Reflecting on his own words, Davidson writes:
Let your heart break. Allow, wait, look forward. A life you have protected and cared for carefully. Broken, cracked, torn in half. Sadly, your heart breaks, and in two parts, which shake on the table, a rich world is revealed. Wet, dark soil, ready for the start of a new life.
Davidson – who is living with severe heart disease after contracting a deadly virus – was just a toddler when his heart first broke. Long before she became a talented pianist and songwriter, she was a three-year-old girl living with stepparents and siblings in Sweden, until she was removed from the only family she knew to be adopted by an English teacher from Ohio, who eighteen years later was revealed to be her biological mother, abandoning her baby because of bad love. Davidson writes:
Here is the heart of loss. To my three-year-old self, my adopted family it was my family. The day my mother knocked on Solveig's door and brought me home as an adopted child, I lost my first mother and father, three brothers, home, country and language. I lost myself and became another child. The shiny child waited at the window. A black child appeared. To the passing eye, I was unremarkable, ordinary – but inside I was silent, dark, and eternally saddened by a nameless loss.
Soon, her single mother married and Tina became the eldest of five children living in an itinerant family in Turkey, Germany, and Israel. Eventually, that dark inner child found light in music as he became a skilled classical composer, building on “that beautiful, captivating feeling,” and “the sigh of coming home.” You write:
Music, like life, is not above it. There is no clear reason for it except that it is. And that's the magic of it. Like swimming in the dark underground, life unfolds miraculously.
And yet an unrelenting longing lurked beneath it all. After thirty years of separation, Davidson began to reconnect with his adoptive family, only to learn that his adoptive mother had died of carcinoma the previous year. Dwelling in her grief – a “enduring and enduring” grief that drove the hidden grief she'd been living on the edge of existence – was her way of wresting new life from the broken pieces of her heart. Thinking about this tender and turbulent process:
The path of memory was filled with incredible beliefs and ideas that worked, silently and deadly, behind the scenes. My progress was uneven. I adjusted my understanding, jumped forward, and then I rolled for weeks in the fog. After being released, I showed up to work on a new piece of the puzzle. The darkness began to diminish, my anger subsided, my depression subsided; I started to breathe.
Writing the story of his life by reflecting on the heartbeat of all life, he looks at what makes the ground ready for this new fecundity as we continue to grapple with the past, with who we were and the lives we live and the losses we have lost:
The past oppresses the present with surprising consistency. Nothing different or new, it's always a background image. Time-lapse photography captures the movement of many images in our lives. Danger lurks around every corner. Rebuilding yourself will challenge perceptions of yourself, recovery will allow old pain to grow.
However, the price of forgotten memories is high. My doll of darkness is cruel. You are perpetuating false beliefs and forcing simulations that I cannot control.
The miracle is simple. The miracle is that we rise again from suffering. The miracle is the persistence of the soul to find itself, to look hard in the dark, to go back, and to hold our remains. The miracle is that we recreate ourselves.
Through the lens of both creative work and life itself, it echoes Henry Miller's deep understanding of control and dedication, and embodies the most productive form of being:
Name allow you ask for balance and help me rethink the issue of identity and parenthood. Allow it provides a way of growth and authority for questions. Many controls force the finger into the sacred area, leaving a trail of infection. To allow, ultimately, is to be.
Let Your Heart Break is a comprehensive study, exploring with rare compassion and poetic insight the fundamentals of love, forgiveness, creativity, and what it takes to step out of inner darkness into the greater universe of light, anchored in the life-tested truth that “in the end, we are the measure of love we leave behind.” Check out these pieces from Kahlil Gibran on how to deal with the uncertainty of love, Hannah Arendt on love and the fear of loss, and Alain de Botton on surviving heartbreak.
