My dear heart, you need tending.  I am grateful for your resilience and your patience, for your unwavering presence in the chest of my soul through all that you have endured.  I vow my devotion to you now… to listen to you, to trust you, to set you free.

I will forgive myself for letting harm come to you, and for holding on to the pain of others so tightly.  For letting you drown in the grief of the world.  For the conscious and unconscious agreements I made to try and keep you safe.  For the ways I have separated myself from you and abandoned you.  For the carefully constructed fortress I built up around you that did not actually hold any clear or safe boundaries.

I will dismantle the walls that surround you, brick by brick, and I will not punish myself for building them in the first place.  I will give you safe space to heal – from the wounds of lovers, of self-flagellation, of the grief that comes with being human, from the witch’s wound that told me I would die from speaking what is written on your walls.  I will build an altar before you and leave offerings of prayer and laughter, of song and the movement of my body.  I will feed you with sunshine and moonlight, water and earth.  I will surround myself with people who honor you.  I will tend, nurture, and align myself to you.  I will make space for the desires that live inside you to be birthed into my awareness, and I will let them be free and heard and seen when I come to know them.  I will trust that I am worthy of these desires, that I can ask for them, and that I can receive their manifestations.

I will overcome my fear of letting you be open for the world to see.  I will not be ashamed for wanting to be open to you, for wanting you to be open to others, for wanting the exchange of love flow freely to and from you.  I will let you love and break and mend and love, over and over again.  I want to live from your center and feel you flow to my fingertips, to my mouth, down to my feet.  Let me speak and feel and walk in your light.

I will come to embody the understanding that when I open to you, a reservoir of truth and love is birthed and can flow freely.  That this is how the divine speaks and breathes and lives within and through me while I walk in this sacred vessel of a body.  That this is how the love and wisdom of my ancestors speak to and through me.  I will trust this holy language, and I will let myself be a conduit for it to channel through.  I will tether my voice to you with a golden thread.

I will no longer seek safety through trying to silence or control you.  I will risk pain and grief for truth, whether or not it will be received or returned to me, and will allow myself to feel all that you have the capacity to let me feel.  I will not believe the lies that the amount of love that can flow from you and be received by you is scarce or limited.  I will remember that the deepest grief is a reflection of the depth of my love, and I will accept the beautiful gifts that you bring me in both the light and the darkness.  I will see the duality of your humanness and your divinity, and surrender to all of it.  I will find comfort in the discomfort of deepening further into the vulnerability that this requires.

I will honor your soft nudges and your rallying cries.  Your longing and your pain.  I will lean in close and listen to the quietest whispers.  I will meet your aches with even more love.  I will remember that you are my holy compass, and return back to you each time I forget.  I will follow the path that you lay out before me, even when I can’t yet see where it leads.

And my dear heart, I am terrified, but I see no other way.  I have tried to keep you safe and locked away for too long.  You have the floor now… I am listening.