Zeroing in on your heart. There’s something there.
Your heart is the height of the waterfall and the slant of the continent and the tug of our lover moon and everything that keeps water flowing through life, your heart is that for you.
Listen.
Your heart doesn’t know that life and love are different. All the hearts you’ve ever heard of in poem or scientific rumor, all those hearts are your heart.
Listen.
It’s beating the pull of hot molten love, keep moving. Molten love is what you’re made of, liquid at 98.6.
Listen.
Quietly flowing through your eardrum with all the force you have, your Nile, your Mississippi, your creek in the backyard, a river is all you are, and your heart flows it. Your heart is all you are.
Listen. When you try to choke your heart, the pain is a flood you can’t drown in. When you try to shrink your heart, it gushes back with a death that won’t let you die.
I try a little love now and then, I try to love occasionally. My heart, beats, all, the, time, stays with it. My heart is real love.
Your heart flows with life so that you will make life flow. A hot idea that burns your belly comes from your heart like a geyser, and you must move, heat up and rise. Your oldest dream that you had as your youngest thought is a spring trickling slowly forever and if you don’t drink it, it will slowly wash away your heartless life.
Be sensible, say killers. Be sensible if you want but first find something sensible that will replace your heart, that will sustain every atom of your being every minute of your day. Sensible. Make a deal with something that will keep you a living solid liquid all your life.
Listen to your heart beating in the night and noisy afternoon. It beats and beats again and beats again and thank you, thank you, and it beats again and it beats again. Will it beat again? Yes.
What does your heart want you to do? Listen.
From Random Kindness and Senseless Acts of Beauty
To be published this Spring by Barn Owl Books (Berkeley, California)
Copyright © 1983 Anne Herbert, Box 428, Sausalito, CA 94966
