We are the scars love leaves...

Love tears a whole where there wasn't one before. It does this when it arrives and also when it escapes. And it very rarely leaves the same way it came in. Every time love comes to a close, we simultaneously feel the pain of two wounds: the pain of where love clawed it's way out of us, and the lingering pain of where it tore it's way in.

David Brooks writes that "your personality is the hidden history of the places where love entered your life or was withdrawn from your life." If David Brooks is right than it means that the person we become is a kind of scar tissue. When we are pierced by the entrance and exit wounds of love we are what develops in response. How we heal will decide who we are. We can become callused and closed off. We can stay supple and exposed. We can hide in the cold safety of our isolation, or we can revel in openness of our vulnerable fragility. We can wax and wane between the two. We are the scars love leaves.

Like a constellation of wounded resilience stretching out across shimmering sites of injury and elation, the pin pricks of light cascading through the dark of who we are, are the seemingly coordinated points and places where love has punctured and punctuated our lives.

Maybe some part of this saddens us; the thought that we are little more than spiraling nebula of diffuse density, destruction, and collapse, but that in itself is the wonder of our being, and the wonder of our being here. The places of astronomical trauma, the places of our wreckage and ruin, are the places where the light of ourselves shines the brightest. They are the places that demonstrate that we have been fearfully and wonderfully made.