The Props assist the House
Until the House is built.

But walls come down. Gravity. It’s a given.

I once learned a beautiful story about a Basque ritual for tearing down the walls we build around our hearts. I haven’t been able to find the original version since, but it’s a beautiful story and one I have put into practice for myself.

The Basque, so the story goes, believe we build walls around our hearts when we are hurt. Makes sense. We want to protect ourselves from being hurt again. But the walls eventually numb us. They prevent hurt from getting in, but they prevent love, too. And so when the Basque children are three, they learn a song to help break down those walls so that they can give and receive love. It’s a call and response song with a single word pronounced Oh-shoo-ah, which means, “heart.”

A leader sings the word, and the group responds. And it’s repeated. Then the leader whispers the word and the group responds, and the whisper chorus is repeated. Again and again and again. And again.

It’s a simple ritual that has profound effects.

“Vulnerability,” writes Norman Fischer in Sailing Home,  “is built into our hearts, which can be sliced open at any moment by some sudden shift in the arrangements, some pain, some horror, some hurt. We know and instinctively fear this, so we protect our hearts by covering them against exposure. But this doesn’t work. Covering the heart binds and suffocates it until, like a wound that has been kept dressed for too long, the heart starts to fester and becomes fetid. Eventually, without air, the heart is all but killed off, and there’s no feeling, no experiencing at all.”

Years ago, my friend, poet Jude Janett, told me, “Tear it down. Everything you built. Better to disassemble it than to stand pants down in the debris.”

Turns out I had to stand pants down in the debris to know what she meant. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could learn from each other’s experience?

Sometimes we don’t know a wall exists until we bump into it. And when we do, it’s an invitation—an invitation to more spaciousness in our lives. More freedom. Nice invite! Of course we want more freedom. But it means a lot of work …

I’ve been writing a lot about walls lately. Check out my new video below, or use this link: Off the Wall

And if you’re interested in writing or thinking about walls yourself, here are some ideas. Read Mending Wall by Robert Frost.  Then think about a person you love and what kinds of walls you build together. Write that person a letter about how you think the building process goes—what you use to build the walls, how you do the building, perhaps how they come down.

Or try what I like to call “three writes”—free write for three minutes each on each of three questions. Here are three on walls:

What walls do you want to tear down?
What walls are you afraid to tear down?
If these walls could talk, what would they say about you?

Though the writing may not make it easier to tear down the walls, it might help us see the rewards: when the walls are down, how beautifully the light comes in.  Oh yeah, the wind, too.

Oshua. Oshua. 

POETRY NEWS:

A Daily Dose of Poetry
To read my daily poems, check out my blog at A Hundred Falling Veils

Curious About What Makes Writers Write?
An Elevated View: Colorado Writers on Writing (Seven Oaks Publishing, 2011) is now available. It includes my essay on my path as a writer alongside essays by some of my heroes and friends—David Mason, Mark Todd, Susan Tweit, Laurie Wagner Buyer and others… Click on title to order or for more information.

In Search of Inspiration?
Poems of Awakening: An International Anthology of Spiritual Poetry is released in June, which includes several of my poems alongside Li-Young Lee, Naomi Shihab Nye, Hafiz, Mary Oliver, James Wright, Thich Nhat Hanh and others. Click on title to order or for more information.