I have had this quotation from Alice Walker floating around on my computer forever.  time to share it.

“Hearts are there to be broken, and I say that because that seems to be just part of what happens with hearts.  I mean, mine has been broken so many times that I have lost count.  But it just seems to be broken open more and more and more, and it just gets bigger.  In fact, I was saying to my therapist not long ago, “You know, my heart by now feels like it has just sort of dropped open, you know, like how a big suitcase falls open.  It feels like that.”  Instead of that feeling of having a thorn through your heart, that feeling [Buddhist teacher] Pema Chodron talks about in tonglen meditation, you have a sense of openness, as if the wind could blow through it.  And that’s the way I’m used to my heart feeling.  The feeling of the heart being so open that the wind blows through it.”

Alice Walker, Shambhala Sun, January 1997