Tag: heart

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Wondrous Heart

My mom was a faithful sender of valentines, and I found myself really missing her this past Valentine’s Day. It was as good an excuse as any to eat chocolate hearts with my coffee. Later, I indulged in several pastel-colored conversation hearts, stopping to read only a few of the special messages imprinted on them: QT PIE, TEXT ME, MISS YOU. 

Consumed with all things heart, I googled how many times heart is used as a metaphor and found this stat in the European Heart Journal: The Oxford English Dictionary has an entry of 15,000 words for the word heart, most of which relate to its use as a metaphor for emotional states, reasoning and other meanings such as the centre of places and things or the central point in an argument. (“The Heart, a Constant and Universal Metaphor” by Desmond Sheridan, MD, PhD) 

The heart is queen of metonymy and metaphor. It can be warm like a hearth or cold and hard like a stone. Within lies the hallowed space we retreat to for grounding and renewal. We cross it, hope to die, and swear all manner of promises on it. The heart swells, it overflows, it is still, empty, lost or seeking. It is the sacred vessel in which we carry the ones we love. Resilient and valiant, no matter how battered, it will put itself out there again and again, often against our mind’s objections. Oh silly, brave, precious heart, we are nothing without you. 

Endlessly wondrous, in a day, the average heart beats 100,000 times and pumps an astounding 1,500 to 2,000 gallons of blood. One heart transplant patient claims she recovered to find herself craving beer and chicken nuggets, and later discovered they had been pleasures of her young male donor. A pediatric surgeon told me the mother of one of his patient’s worried about her son’s soul during surgery, so clear was she that the heart was its habitat. 

The head sits above the heart and far too often takes the lead putting our better judgment in peril, obscuring our higher selves. What if egos literally had to be checked at the door like coats at a restaurant, and we were forced to lead with our hearts? Would we then lay down our swords? Would we all win the day? Would it matter?

What I know is that if the heart is not at the table, I’m not interested in the conversation. DREAM BIG, PEACE, LOVE YOU.

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Follow Your Heart’s GPS

UnknownBrian Doyle wrote a wonderful book called The Wet Engine: Exploring the Mad Wild Miracle of the Heart. It was in this book that I learned a hummingbird, with its rapid heartbeat and two-year lifespan, has the same number of heartbeats a human has in a lifetime, and that at 5’ long, 4’ wide, 5’ high, weighing 400 pounds, the heart of the blue whale is the largest on the planet. The human heart weighs in at 10-12 ounces and is about the size of a fist.

“Nobody has ever measured, not even poets, what the heart can hold.” So said Zelda Fitzgerald whose heart, one imagines, experienced the gamut of emotions in her extraordinary and ultimately tragic lifetime.

Gratitude and wonder hold hands in the heart, wide-eyed and a little gap-mouthed, ready to be delighted and surprised at any moment. Stress and tension, handcuffed together, frequently lurk uninvited. Forgiveness fights fires. Grief, normally in chambers, engulfs when awoken. Favorite people wander the corridors, places and things take up space in different rooms. And yet, as Zelda suggested, the heart’s ability to expand and hold more is unknown but likely vaster than a blue whale’s heart.

When alert and not operating by rote, the heart possesses the extraordinary vision of a raptor seeing things in focus far and wide, making connections like the way the forces of darkness often push the better angels to prevail, and how the persecuted sometimes carve the path to compassion and change. It has the ability to hear like a moth, to float and flutter with the same grace. The heart feels best with arms widespread, guileless, loyal and loving as a child or a pet.

It truly has a mind of its own, which is in constant communication with the brain in our heads. When heart and head are in sync, we have greater mental clarity and intuitive ability. When the heart experiences emotions like compassion and appreciation, its rhythm becomes more coherent and harmonious. So next time you feel adrift, take a quick minute or two to listen to and follow your heart’s wise lead. She’ll get you where you need to be.

 

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Knight’s Dare

thumbnail-1 2Several two-story high trees were felled in the woods on the Palisades after Superstorm Sandy; their broad, shallow roots useless against hurricane force winds. A mile into a walk, the massive root ball of one of them faced me, a fallen warrior as majestic in death as in life, lying in state holding a shield decorated in a mesmerizing pattern of intertwined roots and dirt. As I paid my respects, like something out of a fable, the brave knight dared me to steal a heart-shaped stone the size of my fist from the center of his shield. I accepted the dare and slipped the stone into a pocket.

At home, I rinsed off the dirt with warm water and put it on the windowsill to dry where it sat forgotten for a few days. But it lured me back. It fit perfectly in my palm. My thumb and fingers ran over the tawny marbled surface, turning it over and back, instantly soothing.

A jagged buttonhole gash marks the top of one side. On the other, there is a hole next to the left ventricle where scar tissue has formed in the shape of a shark’s tooth. Small pockmarked wounds create an uneven pattern of dots on both sides. Cracks and veins that didn’t create full breaks tell stories from before the storm. It is flawless in its imperfection.

Virginia Woolf committed suicide by filling her pockets with stones and walking into the river. The Hope diamond, one of the most precious and now belonging to the Smithsonian, was said to carry a curse that ended when Harry Winston donated it rather than sell it for profit. Canyons shaped by rivers, pebbles washed up on beaches, desert rock formations, greats like Gibraltar, Uluru, Stonehenge and Plymouth, pyramidal stones—storytellers all.

Hard, smooth and uneven, the umbo I hold pulses with life, the connector between me and the tree and the earth that warmed it. It tells me a story about how that knight held my heart in its fist, keeping it hidden and safe, returning it to me when I was ready, reminding me the consequence of accepting the dare is to risk again.