News flash: the heart is the brain. Our hearts are in a direct line of communication to the brain, neurologically connected to every region of the brain, generating an electromagnetic field that can be measured at sixteen feet, 5000x stronger than your brain’s electromagnetic field. It is our most powerful, primary organ of perception, sending hormonal, electric, magnetic and chemical messages to the brain, impacting how we think and feel.
What if all the choices we made…you know, the ones your brain said were a mistake, bad idea, you’ll end up sorry, broke and abandoned, were the heart’s wisdom leading us beyond logic, to choices we hardly understood ourselves, to the wrong friends who turned out to be the right ones, and a lifetime of late night phone calls and the raucous laughter only old friends get to share.
What if the heart knows the way home, if all the twists and turns, dark alleys and dead ends we took were really part of the map, those unmarked roads we dared to take that led to a jewel of wisdom there was no other way to acquire?
And what if everything we condemn as a mistake when it is 3am and we can’t sleep, sorting through our choices like a shoebox filled with old photos, instead blessed as a choice made from the superior wisdom of the heart, and what if we finally saw that our crooked path had always been illuminated by our guides and ancestors who were there pointing the way, whispering here, turn here, and we did.
Pilgrimages of the heart singing songs of longing, off to the uncharted places we’ve been warned about, places marked there be dragons on the ancient maps, places that threaten to shatter our hearts, places that logic warns us about, saying grief will be the price we pay for loving too much and too hard, but we open our hands and offer the full price knowing that some wounds that break us also strengthen us, and that initiation and transformation can be accessed through no other portal.
What if the heart knows what the mind is slow to comprehend: that we were born from love and will return to love, and in our brief moment here on this green goddess earth, only love is worth our attention, only love is worth our seeking.
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Read more stories like this in my book The Ripening: Essays on Love, Loss, Marriage and Aging, available from Amazon.
Nancy London 