Heart Shaped Box(buckle)

I had the alarmingly delightful happenstance of finding recently – in a local arts market – this entirely excellent belt buckle. It is a stylized diagram of an anatomically correct heart and it is, for me, perfect. Purveyed by the equally agreeable local artist Pip Robbins, whose art and creations are thrillingly wonderful – and you should totally check her stuff out immediately, if not sooner.

I told her – in the brevity acceptable of having met someone for 43 seconds while buying a belt buckle – that I simply needed said buckle because it was awesome and on account of having to have my silly heart fixed. We chatted for a bit, said collections of words that ended in smiles, and when I was leaving she gave me a button with a pig on it, because she is top-notch human like that. It now lives, in all its adorable piggy splendor, on our fridge door.

You are always exactly where you need to be in life, in the physicality of circumstances that are either splendid or ugly-prickly at times. Sometimes a simple smile, the power of acceptance in observations and a firm grip on the knowledge that our impermanence in life is the only really permanent thing, can make everything that fraction more manageable.

This buckle makes me feel that even though my journey forwards has some overwhelmingly upcoming ugly-prickly stuff I can, relax, smile and luxuriate in the confidence that everything changes and it will all eventually get a bit more splendid again. A friendly smile is around every corner if you keep your eyes open long enough to smile back, and at the very least I know that my pants wouldn’t fall down because of this extra sweet belt buckle.