Restringing Harmony from Heartbreak

Red flags to white flags...to what flags?

Apr 27, 2025

Some seasons do not announce themselves until they are already upon us. We stumble into them heart-first, and they unravel all the neat stories we thought we knew about love, loss, and becoming.

Heartbreak is one of these seasons that reshapes us from the inside, carving out the spaces where new life can grow. This is a reflection written from within that season, and beyond it; a letter to the ones we have been, the ones we have lost, and the ones we are still becoming.

The air smelled faintly of damp earth and woodsmoke, the low golden light leaning long across the familiar street, where a small cluster of snowdrops nodded their shy white bells next to the rumbling taxi. The little lawn outside our family home, upon which my parents' beslippered feet were resting, was a prayer woven from the silvery earth of that crisp February morning, where Winter’s hand was loosening its grip and the delicate edges of each slender blade were glistening with pearls of thawing dew.

As I pulled the taxi door closed, my mother surrendered her courageous attempts to resist the tears arising from her overflowing heart, with which she had nurtured me, spilling onto the graceful arc of her sunlit cheekbone. Beside her stood my father, steady and enduring as a great oak weathered by a thousand seasons, the years having carved their rings into the furrow of his brow and the lightly scattered grey of his temples, his hands resting open and sure by his sides; bearing everything the way the earth bears the sky, his devoted heart a boundless canopy stretched unwaveringly above those he loves.

We had held each other there, in the arrival of a new goodbye that none of us had anticipated, rooted in our love yet yielding to the inevitability of change, each of us more utterly and irrevocably alive in the hush of that clear February morning.

An hour later, I was sitting at Gatwick airport, bewildered by the way life seemed to have opened itself along wild and unforeseen paths since that first improbable pilgrimage to the jungle in 2021; a journey whose echoes were still reverberating through my body, and whose aftershocks, carried on the casual words of a couple of surfers I met after leaving the Amazon, had somehow conspired to plant the mad and marvelous idea to pack my life into a few bags and move to Peru.

February 7th, 2022, Gatwick Airport

“We must let go of the life we had planned, so as to accept the one that is waiting for us.”
- Joseph Campbell

And although I had not planned, nor even dared to imagine, that I would return to the jungle after that first time, life, in its mischievous and often maddening wisdom, had already begun leading me subtly but inexorably back to the places and the parts of myself I had still left unattended.

As a young woman, I had wandered through romantic relationships as one might wander through half-remembered dreams, some lasting a few years, others only a few months, each one leaving its own distinct fingerprint of longing and loss; each separation embalmed in different shades of heartbreak. The bruised violets of fresh grief, throbbing behind my ribs with every breath pierced by splinters; the heavy grey waves of absence that gathered across the horizon of lonely evenings, their cloying ache reflected by the empty pillows beside me; the sudden crimson flashes of anger, hot and sharp, bleeding out from old wounds remembered too late to save anything; the pale, almost translucent ache of a sorrow worn so thin; and deeper still, the raw, feral pit that suffocated the gut after abandonment, an oil-slick black clinging to the bones, stertorous and choking, nauseous hues of betrayal snaking up the dead weight of a crumbling spine.

Separation, Edvard Munch (1896). Held in the Munch Museum in Oslo.

In time, I began to close myself off to romantic love altogether, a gradual withdrawal that hardened into habit, two years before that first step into the jungle, when love had come to feel like a cruel and alien thing, a connection to the loneliest place in existence, where promises dissolved and faith felt like folly; and so, without ever saying it aloud, I told myself that perhaps it would be easier to live cynically, to hold love at a careful distance, to wear a bright armour of independence that declared I needed nothing from anyone, that I could outsmart the tender foolishness of yearning by simply refusing to hope, because in the end, it seemed less humiliating to expect nothing than to risk discovering again that some essential part of me was unlovable, naïve, and exposed.

Yet love, as I would come to learn, was never a calculated, intellectual pursuit, nor was it ever tricked or tamed by the mind’s many meagre strategies of defence; love, being what it is, was waiting to be rediscovered beneath an armour built from the ashes of longing and terror.

That first foray into the jungle in 2021 managed to piece back together something in me, something fragile and easily frightened, the seedlings of an ability to be vulnerable again with others, and yet even then, I still found myself repeating old patterns, drifting into the same relationships with different people, attraction flowering into infatuation, infatuation waning into a loneliness even sharper than before, as if the closer I came to another, the more pronounced the gap between our inner worlds became, a kind of unbridgeable precipice opening at the very point where intimacy refused to grow.

There would come a moment, always, when the depth of feeling between us seemed misunderstood and untranslatable, met with a blank, embarrassed discomfort, with the awkward shifting of feet and the clearing of throats. Of course, they were always kind and good people, but what I had not seen, or had not dared to see, was the way I was drawn again and again to those whose unavailability mirrored my own, whose defenses harmonized with mine in the foreboding dance of ancient wounds.

We yearn for the very thing that once wounded us, and we offer it only the versions of ourselves wrapped in armour, forgetting that love cannot reach the parts of us we hide, no matter how earnestly we wish it to. Too often, I blamed the other for failing to embrace the parts of me I had buried so deeply that even I could not recognise them, and too often, I resented the other, without meaning to, for showing me the sorrow of my own self-rejection. Sometimes it seems like we’re so fixated on everyone else’s red flags that we forget to examine the possibility of our own.

So, waving white flags at my own red flags, I returned to the jungle, this time carrying the conscious intention to learn a new way of loving, a way that did not begin and end in fear.

Dostoevsky wrote that “Hell is the suffering of being unable to love”, and perhaps that was a large part of my struggle, not that I had not been loved, but that my capacity to surrender fully to its giving and receiving seemed stifled by an unconscious fear in which I was lost. I would run before I could be too vulnerable, abandoning myself before another could, and it was this that ayahuasca began to tear down: not the wound itself, but the fortresses I had built around it.

The ceremonies were not easy; they asked everything of me, to feel abandonment, loneliness, rejection, in their rawest, most primal forms, without escaping, without numbing, without fleeing into story or blame, and in doing so, they offered a kind of peace that words and therapy alone could not reach, a peace born of immersion rather than evasion.

Love inevitably invites us to confront what we believe to be unlovable within ourselves, because love, in its essential nature, is unconditional; it rejects nothing, even hatred; it simply acknowledges all that presents itself to the experience of “nowness.” It does not mean, of course, that we must endure abuse or real threats to our safety, but it does mean that somewhere beneath the endless preferences and fears of the mind, there is a place in us where everything belongs, where every experience is allowed to unfold in the infinite field of awareness without needing to be pushed away or clung to. The more we notice, the more conscious we become; and the more conscious we are, the more we can respond, rather than react, to the mysteries and miseries of living.

For most of my life, I had carried within me an unconscious, unexamined belief that love was something to find in another person, something external that might complete the unfinished architecture of my being, and now, after so many spirals inward and outward, I see that the wholeness of love’s essential nature is to be recognised, like an ancient wellspring beneath and throughout the rubble of forgetfulness, and that the only way to truly share love is to first know the place within myself where nothing is missing.

It reveals itself through the tender willingness to remain present with all that I am, even when the currents of fear or loneliness rise powerfully against the shores of my heart. And in that simple recognition, another understanding, long buried, has begun to unfurl its delicate tendrils through the soil of memory: that the love I once felt too small to understand, the love embodied in the imperfect, stubborn devotion of my parents, whose fighting and reconciling wove a tapestry far richer than I could then perceive, was never absent, even when it was tangled, never broken, even when it bent under the weight of ordinary human sorrow.

I see now that what I had often run from, the hurt, the mess, the torment of longing, they had stayed with. Faithfully, instead of easily, even in the pain. And somehow, in the weaving of the flawed perfection from their tender efforts, they were teaching me, long before I could see it, that love is less about the absence of pain than about the courage to remain, and relentlessly surrender to it.

The Kiss, Gustav Klimt (1908-1909). Österreichische Galerie Belvedere Museum in the Upper Belvedere Palace, Vienna

It sounds like the greatest cliché to say that healing begins within, but there are things clichés try to gesture toward and fail to grasp at all with words. Nothing can be polished into worthiness, and love isn’t achieved as a prize. We can only awaken to what has always been, the pure radiance of being itself, beyond fear, beyond striving, beyond every story the mind has ever told about what was lacking. The only way I’ve been able to begin to recognise this wholeness, truly, is to inquire into what I am beyond the names and shapes and stories I have clung to, beyond the body, beyond the mind, in the stillness of the question that has enchanted saints and fools alike:

Who am I?

That has been the true journey of these past few years in Peru: not so much a voyage outward, though the jungles and rivers and mountains have all left their marks upon me, but an immersion inward, into the heart of the question that holds all others, of feeling rather than numbing, of surrendering rather than striving, of direct experience rather than concepts and theories.

Heartbreak, rather than the end of anything essential, was the breaking open of a door I didn’t even know I had closed, and on reflection from where I am now, smiles and asks, “What door?” Part of creation is destruction; part of love is the willingness to be remade. And from every fracture, after the futility of pointing fingers and “why me”, have passed, there arises the chance to ask what might be born from here, to contemplate what truly matters now. Who are you when there is no longer anything left to prove or defend? Who are you…really?

And if you dare to ask, dare, too, to remain long enough to know the answer.

Image by alto2 from Pixabay.

Thank you for sharing this small moment on the road with me. If something here stirred a memory, softened a sorrow, or simply offered a moment of companionship, I would love to hear from you. Feel free to share your reflections, your stories, or your questions in the comments below.

Restringing Harmony from Heartbreak

Red flags to white flags...to what flags?

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