Life Expands Inside Us

“Learn to embrace sorrow / look straight at its face and / joy will reappear. / All action sways between / contraction and expansion / both as important as the opening / and closing / of the wings of a bird in flight.”

- Rumi

When our hearts contract in sorrow, ironically, a space is created. Rumi says, “Embrace sorrowful thoughts for they / sweep the house of your heart clean.” With grief comes a feeling of emptiness, which is actually the heart’s expansiveness. Life expands inside us when we feel that we have lost a part of us. When our hearts contract in sorrow, we miss our old selves but at the same time, we know that we will not go back to our old selves. We don’t even want to. Something has happened. We’ve experienced what we did not expect or hoped to not experience and we now hold another layer of life that we did not have before. The space left by what we’ve lost reminds us of a possibility that is not known yet but now there is a space for it.

Our souls have become larger. They hold more. Just as the bird opens and closes its wings to keep suspended in the air on and off throughout its life, the heart’s contracting and expanding is our life’s work.