This is the new book on my list of favorite fiction books. The Heart and the Bottle by Oliver Jeffers. I swooned when I read it.
It is very different from the other books on my list. First of all, it is a children’s picture book and takes less than five minutes to read. Among my other favorites are Wuthering Heights, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, the Anne of Green Gables series and Mansfield Park- not exactly easy reading for my eight-year-old. Secondly, it inspired me, challenged me and spoke to my soul. Pretty good for thirty pages of very little text.
The story is about a girl who is sad after losing someone she loves, so she puts her heart in a bottle to keep it safe and hangs it around her neck. Her awe and amazement for life fades without her heart and she lives that way for years. Then a child, full of curiosity and joy reminds her that she was once something more and she decides to take her heart out of the bottle. The problem is she can’t remove it. Another child can, however, and returns her heart to her. Life is beautifully full once again.
I randomly checked this book out from the library for my children, read it to them and in an instant I knew something new. My own heart spends too much time in a bottle. Heartache is so hard to take, I have bottled it up a time or two and gone about my day. Life is easier when you turn off your emotions. You get more done. You have fewer confrontations. You sleep better.
But like the girl who wants her heart back, sometimes I forget how to open the bottle.
There has been a grace for me in this with my young children. Jeffers is right about children and their ability to set life ablaze with awe and joy. Motherhood has freed my heart in many ways.
My children are growing up, though, little by little. Someday they won’t be the winsome wee loves that I know today. When they become like me, grown and perhaps mildly cynical, I may decide I want to get more done, have fewer confrontations and sleep better. Then who will open the bottle and give me back my heart?
To live with my heart fully beating in my chest, feeling pain and loss, joy and elation is the only remedy I can seem to find. Placing my heart in God’s hands, facing my own inconsistencies and loving uneven people in an unstable world is a daunting task, but one that I can’t ignore any longer.
Feeling loved and bursting with love in return, is there a greater joy than this in life? It’s a bit of risky business, I know, but I just can’t bear to live with that bottle around my neck any longer.
Bye-bye bottle.
