Well, I did it.
It has been really close to 10 years since I last put ink into my skin. I haven’t even thought about it until today (well, yesterday now.) I was in Dallas to catch a performance, since I couldn’t go to Albuquerque like I had wanted to for Del Castillo, and I got a little too bored.
I went to the tattoo shop I had seen and got an impromptu little piece on my left inner forearm. It’s a broken heart, or as I called it in the days when I originally designed it, a shredded heart. Heart with a large piece torn out of it from the top, like it had been ruptured. I meant it once to represent my absolutely rotten luck with relationships, but that has changed.
Awhile back, I came across a book called “Sand and Foam,” by Kahlil Gibran. He wrote “The Prophet”, a beautiful and moving piece about our relationship to God. “Sand & Foam” is a collection of quotes from Gibran. Among them I found this one, which is now my signature on all e-mails:
“How will my heart be unsealed, unless it be broken?”
I understood it immediately to be about developing compassion. If one has not suffered, has not loved and lost, has not gone through torment somehow, it is not possible to understand where another may be coming from. It will not be possible to have true compassion for another, if you have never had to walk that path.
It is ironic to me that I have heard things similar in meaning much of my life, even from my beloved E.A. Poe, and failed to understand.
“Better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.” comes from the same vein, though it may be considered a tad more self-centered. Leave it to Kahlil to touch upon the true lesson. Once you know what it is to hurt, you might just find it in yourself not to do those things that can be hurtful to those, especially, that you love. And even those you don’t know.
It is so easy to lash out at a stranger, because you will not have to directly deal with any hurt feelings. Developing compassion for all things allows you to know in advance that everything you do has its consequences.
and sometimes you cannot help but hurt another. It is the nature of things that some must suffer some of the time. Compassion is what gives us the ability to say “I’m sorry” and mean it. It is the point where two or more persons can find common ground and hopefully rise above it. It is the one thing that can put us as a species back into the Grace of God, no matter what faith, what path you may each follow.
All this from a single line of words.
And now I wear it on my sleeve, permanently, that I may never forget.