A Heart Can Break | Catherine Viel

By Catherine Viel, July 22, 2021

(Golden Age of Gaia)

July 21, 2021

Unshackled,
you move slowly towards the door.
You feel a revolution coming,
your own four walls trembling.
~Michael C. Blumenthal, Ordinary Heartbreaks

How much heartbreak is too much?



A friend’s twenty-one-year-old cat passed away, the second of two who lived to a contented old age before going on to higher realms without the assistance of euthanasia. He let them die in their own ways.

He’s quite sentimental, offsetting his cynicism and logic. I know how dearly he held those two cats in his heart.

After a decent interval had passed, I inquired, “So are you thinking of maybe getting another cat….?”

He shook his head. “Never again. There’s only so many times a heart can break.”

I didn’t ask twice.

*****

I’m finding that the trouble with having an open heart is that everything can come in. Pain, joy, delight, despair. When the heart opens to emotional awareness, it doesn’t hire a bouncer to keep out the riffraff.



So I spend days mourning an abandoned hawk fledgling that has been shrieking throughout the neighborhood like a soul in uttermost torment. I asked a neighbor who’s a longtime birder what his thoughts were.

Partly in jest, he said, “You can buy earplugs.”

He told me about red-shouldered hawks and the fifty-fifty odds of them living to maturity. He stated that nature wouldn’t want the DNA of this young hawk if it can’t figure out how to feed itself after the parents have left at the end of fledgling season.

I tell him I understand, it all makes sense. I call the wildlife rescue place which confirms everything he said, adding that no, they can’t do anything for this particular hawk. It’s just the way it is.

I don’t buy the earplugs. And I wonder if the heart-wrenching sense of abandonment I experience for this hawk hearkens to a trapped emotion of abandonment in me…and resolve to address it at my next Emotion Code session. (1)



*****

Today, instead of grief at the piercing shriek flying overhead, a tentative acceptance sets in. This young hawk is still trying. It has not given up after an entire week on its own. Surely it would’ve starved by now if it hadn’t found the nourishment its parents no longer provide. Maybe it will be in the “survival” part of the fifty-fifty odds.

The Creator Writings recently noted that many will be leaving:

Whether it involves relationships or your plane of existence, please do not take it personally. Each soul knew what was going to occur before they arrived. As challenging as it may be to accept, it is / was their free will at work.

All of us with our free will. To incarnate as who, and what, we choose. Have I been a hawk? A tiger? A firefly? Have I been other than human?

The hawk calls one last time and wheels away, out of earshot. I bless it and its prey and its fate, whatever that might be. And then I let it go.



(1) see The Emotion Code by Dr. Bradley Nelson