The Emptied Heart

Each new day we are slowly learning the lessons of grief, those lessons that tell us a heart cannot burn with such pain forever. It will then either be destroyed by the flames or it will become stronger than it would otherwise have been. It may become, in time, an "emptied heart," as the German writer Hermann Hesse has called it, a wounded heart made of a porcelain so delicate but so strong it can survive the fire that made it to become more beautiful than it was. That which was superficial will have been burned away. That which remains is a heart not free of love but perfected by loss.