Wild Broken Heart

5356376053_50d5577f0a_bThis is meditation on the healing that comes from a certain wildness in each of us. It was inspired at the April 2016 New Warrior Training Adventure hosted by ManKind Project Chicago. I was honored to serve on staff. Thanks to Warrior brothers Jeff Robins and George Rounds for your influence on this piece. Special thanks to Warrior brother Mark Davids who said the words that inspired it, “wild broken heart.” This piece appears in This Precious Life: Encountering the Divine with Poetry and Prayer from CCAR Press.

Wild Broken Heart
My heart is free,
Cracked open by fire,
Pouring radiance and music into the night,
Lifting prayers to the heavens.

This wild broken heart fears nothing,
Embracing stars and secrets.
What more can be done
To rubble and ash?
To dust and whispers?
My feet touch the hot core of the earth.
My hands reach the cold edge of the universe.
I am the hollow bone
That brings medicine and light
From the Soul of Eternity
To this world, to this life.

Take this wild broken heart,
Place it next to yours,
The wildness of your dreams,
The wildness of your laughter,
The wildness of your joy and love,
The truth that pulses through your veins,
And we will shine
Magnificent visions into the darkness,
Summoning the battered, the bruised, the wounded,
Summoning hearts split and torn,
Calling out to the thirst for healing
And the hunger to heal,
Calling wild broken hearts to the center,
To the place within where we all dwell.

Our wild broken hearts sing.
Our wild broken hearts bless.
Our wild broken hearts sparkle and shine.
Together,
Our wild broken hearts
Are whole.

© 2021 CCAR Press from This Precious Life: Encountering the Divine with Poetry and Prayer

Postscript: Other prayers and meditations inspired by MKP and NWTA weekends include: “My Work Remains,” “For the Lost,” “The Descent” and “Fire Within.”

Please check out my CCAR Press Grateful/Joyous/Precious trilogy. The individual books are: This Joyous Soul , This Grateful Heart, and This Precious Life. For reprint permissions and usage guidelines, see “Share the Prayer!” To receive my latest prayers via email, please subscribe (on the home page). You can also connect on Facebook and Twitter. For a taste of my teaching, see my ELItalk video, “Falling in Love with Prayer.”

Photo Source: Youth Worker Movement

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