2 weeks ago
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“Life will break you,” Louise Erdrich wrote in her passionate insistence that “you are here to risk your heart.” It can happen with a shattering, or with a thousand small fissures, but the great paradox — the great salvation — is that every time it happens, you live to see you are unbreakable.
And so, a poem.
CORRECTIVE FOR A BROKEN HEART
by Maria Popova
Why all the threadbare drama,
the stale catastrophism
of calling it broken?
It still beats,
doesn’t it,
still trembles at the sight
of fog flowing through the forest
like a slow dance song.
It was only
dislocated,
lost its locus
for a while,
popped out of the socket
of good sense.
There is no one
to pick up the pieces
because there are no pieces.
Only the firm, fastidious
hand of time
to slide it back
into place.
And after all
who can fault
the wayward compass
when the magnetic north pole
is in constant motion
drifting by fifty kilometers a year
and reversing itself altogether
every few centuries
while each twenty-six thousand years
a different north star
comes to shine its guiding light
above all the confusion.
We are here
to lose our way.
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For seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
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