It’s worth wearing your heart on your sleeve, courageously. The notion stems from chivalry, and knighthood, from Shakespeare and Othello, and like any idiom, faithfully adapts to us in our own perceptions and cultures and meanings, reborn and reborn again as language evolves.
Emotion is ever-present, and beyond language. Feeling is risk. Vulnerability is not weakness. Whether we carry the scarf of our loved one on our arm, a totem of their love around our neck, hold the hand of a child, or endeavor to hold space for massive love of all humanity, it’s rooted in the most beautiful and precious, transcendent of energies.
It is that ethereal glue of this sacred place; we give it so many names, and try desperately to compartmentalize and control, or reserve, or selectively employ it: some deserve it; most do not. What a strange, arrogant folly. Love isn’t of the cowardly sort, and it certainly isn’t in limited supply. We’re merely in the practice of pinching it off — from ourselves, and from the world.
Dare to challenge paradigms and dare to expand beyond the instinctive impulse to fear and defend — in everything; every individual represents the all. Question the judgments and prejudice, and allow the heart on your sleeve to take hold and reclaim the seat in your soul. Allow it to reignite the confidence in your countenance and tap into the effortless, abundant stream of lightness.
Or don’t. What matters, is what matters to you, and there is room enough for all unique perspectives, but even the darkest of hatred is as transient as the birth and death of the universe. You choose to live painfully, or not.
Solvitur ambulando