Learning to live whole-heartedly

Half Life

by Stephen Levine

We walk through half our life
 as if it were a fever dream

barely touching the ground

our eyes half open
our heart half closed.

Not half knowing who we are
we watch the ghost of us drift
from room to room
through friends and lovers
never quite as real as advertised.

Not saying half we mean
or meaning half we say
we dream ourselves
from birth to birth
seeking some true self.

Until the fever breaks
and the heart can not abide
a moment longer
as the rest of us awakens,
summoned from the dream,
not half caring for anything but love.


 I had never heard of Stephen Levine until I read this poem. Then I did some research about him and learned that in addition to being an author and a poet, he did a lot of work in grief counseling. This makes sense to me based on reading this one poem. I have struggled with grief over the last few years, not knowing that it was grief for a long time. But one of the symptoms of grief as described by Levine, is a tendency to "armour our hearts." This is probably a very common experience. In the past year, I've had many realizations related to my heart and how I treat it. For most of my life, I've tried to protect and shield my heart from feeling anything uncomfortable. For anyone who has ever thought of trying this, let me give you a head's up -- it can't be done. Or rather, it can be done for some time, but exactly as Levine says, eventually the heart will not settle for living in this manner any longer and will start protesting.

The heart will start demanding attention. It will start demanding nourishment. And what the heart needs for fuel is love, of course. It turns out that the heart doesn't want to be shielded from experiencing life in its full range of emotions. Because the other half of pain is pleasure. If we constantly fear the uncomfortable, we also limit our ability to experience a whole spectrum of wonderful emotions. When we close our hearts, when we live in fear of having our hearts injured, we live half lives.

I am slowly, slowly, slowly in tiny baby steps, learning to let my heart experience a whole life. It is not easy. It is not especially fun. It requires more faith and more humility than I'd ever expected. But once we start to awaken from our fever dream of grief, the heart will not allow us to go back to living in half-measures. There is no choice. Or rather, the only choice is more love.