Vachon Imagined

Life inside a broken heart becomes meaningless because it has lost contact with its source.

Not because the heart itself is broken. The heart, in its purity, cannot be broken. What becomes broken is our relationship to it when love is mixed with deception.

We are deceived by love in this world because we confuse love with the things we love.

I love chocolate, so I must have chocolate to be happy.

I love someone, so I must possess them.

I love an idea, so everyone must agree with me.

I love war, so destruction becomes justified.

The objects are different, but the movement is the same. Love becomes attachment. Devotion becomes possession. Attention becomes demand. And we begin to believe that what we love must give us something in return.

But underneath all of it is one thing: love itself.

Love is the attention that makes experience possible. It is devotion. It is the willingness to encounter what is here. It is everywhere. It makes everything possible.

Trial is possible because of it.

Heartache is possible because of it.

Loss, war, peril, all possible because of it.

But heartache may be our clearest indication that we have entered an impure heart, not because love has become painful, but because something false has entered into love.

To see it, you must know it.

And to keep from becoming it, you must surrender it.

The pure heart does not manipulate.

It does not deceive.

It does not demand.

It does not say, I must have this or I cannot be whole.

The heart is not evil.

The heart is love.

And under clear vision, this becomes almost impossible to miss.

Everything else is the distortion.

Everything else is the mind taking what is pure and making an identity, a possession, a weapon, a wound, or a demand out of it.

Do not bow to it.

Do not become it.

Let the false thing fall away.

What remains has never been broken.