The other side of love is rarely celebrated, the broken heart after a break up or a passing of a loved one.  On Valentines’ day romantic love demands our attention, but what of us who stand on the other side of love?  The broken hearted, the clipped winged.

When one of my sons first fell in love he was ecstatic, when he fell out of love, he was confused and sad. This he had not expected.  Having been a warrior in love for many moons I knew some of what he was feeling, so I tried to explain to him, “This is the other side of love, the part where you are broken open and you heal so that the next time love visits you are able to hold more of her essence.”

“I don’t like this side of love!”  I don’t imagine anyone does.

When my Father passed away I literally felt my chest open up and a piece of my heart went with him. My grief was so deep it took me many years to call back that piece of me and forgive myself for not being at his bedside when he passed.  My heart has healed and just the other night I had a lovely dream where he and I were having breakfast on a cruise ship-his preverbal ship had finally come in and I saw his radiant happiness. I found peace in his smile. My heart was whole again.

Kahlil Gibran wrote “The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.” So a broken heart mends and becomes more, becomes deeper and able to endure. Things that once gave us butterflies now beat their wings in the vastness of our enlarged and enduring heart.

A broken heart should be celebrated! The pain does go away, if we release it and let it fly. A battered heart, one that has wintered the furrows of love, the other side of love, one that has released the tears of loss becomes the very same healed heart that rejoices deeper to the notes of the love song life sings to us calling us back to love once again.

Each Valentine’s Day brings your heart to a different level of love, with or without Cupid’s arrows; your heart in this moment is a perfect reflection of God’s Divine love.