I am wearing my soft t-shirt with the giant pink heart today.

A month ago I was sitting in the LA airport sobbing all over that heart, soaking it through, wondering how many people passing by wondered what was wrong with the blonde girl crying uncontrollably in the corner.

Today I met with my Shaman and talked about the nature of change in my life, then ate french fries over laughter with a friend at lunch. My heart remains dry.

What a difference a month makes.

That’s the thing about time. It doesn’t always heal things, but it does change things. I am not where I was one month ago when I was in the middle of a violent grief spell, my acceptance and recognition that a life I think I would have really liked to have lived, was not ever going to be lived.

I still feel a hole in my heart from that life.

Some days it’s eerily palpable, and some days it’s simply a dull fade. At times I feel like a ghost of myself went on to live that life, while once again my heart packed up her carpetbags and continued on this sometimes lonely journey of authenticity, seeking, and following a soul calling.

I hope she’s happy, my ghost.

Sometimes I think life will never go back to that place of pure joy I held for such a brief period of time. That’s okay, though.

My shaman said that those who hold great wisdom don’t really have pure joy, it’s more a gritty sort that comes from engaging with the full of life and knowing both darkness and light. She said it’s okay to have a fractured heart that is no longer soft and smooth as it once was, but now holds interesting jags and cracks denoting it’s great depth.

I think I already knew these things. But it is very affirming to hear them from someone wiser than myself who has been following her path of the heart much longer than I. I am grateful for her gifts.

I think this is why I created Little Blonde Girl designs. So no matter how gritty life may get, or how fractured my heart feels, an untarnished joyous part of myself will always have a voice. I will never lose my whimsy.

As for the rest of me, these days I am simply learning to be in the all. Happy, lonely, busy, slow, light, dark, masculine, feminine. The raven and the dove intertwined. I finally figured out this summer that you don’t have to choose just one.

You can be all. You can love all.

So I am. I am practicing loving my all. And enjoying the change that time has wrought in a month in the form of new creative opportunities, tiny moments of pleasures, and the ability to feel myself engage with life again wholeheartedly.

It’s grittier than it once was, my wholeheartedness, but that doesn’t make it any less sincere.

It simply makes it more real.