Reverb13 Day Three: The Heart Speaks

tyunglebower ♦ December 3, 2013 ♦ 4 Comments

Today’s prompt was based on an exercise designed to ask one’s heart what it needs today. What does your heart have to tell you?

I’m not adept at getting messages directly from my heart in the short term, though. When I examine my heart at any given time, what gets reflected back at me is often vague. Vague to the point of either being obvious, (“my heart needs happiness and contentment”) or it is indicative of my not being especially well connected to my heart in the first place.

Part of the problem might be that I don’t know exactly how to define “heart” in such a context. Sometimes it gets conflated with my mind, I think, and my mind tells me that what I am, and what is expected of me is directly related to mostly outside factors: a job, esteem from the community, demonstrable physical productivity. Under such an auspices as this it becomes at times easy for me to conclude that my heart’s desires are not especially relevant. And when they are deemed, even by only a part of me, as irrelevant, it’s only natural that it would be difficult to tune into my heart’s voice.

Given time, however, a long time of asking similar questions of myself, and doing my best to fight back the onslaught of expectations that are thrust upon me by sources that shouldn’t hold that much power over me, a few concepts emerge.

-More honest companionship.

-More quiet, both in terms of contemplation and in terms of freedom from fear and anxiety.

-More curiosity, whimsy and magic.

-Respect for it’s true nature, from others and myself.

-In terms of more concrete requirements, it also needs more of a chance to move people with stories and words, such as this blog post as well as my novels and short fiction. Also with other people’s words, as if the case in theater. Not telling stories for their own sake, but telling them so that they are consumed by people who are moved by them. People who find something of themselves in the stories I tell. My heart wants more of that than I have.

Knowing what the heart desires would be among the easiest things to determine, one might think. Those desires may or may not be feasible at any given moment, but knowing what they are would seem to be easy enough to know. But not with me. It has taken years to know what my heart really longs for, and even now I am not always certain.

But it’s worth asking the question often enough, because some sort of answer tends to emerge eventually, as it would appear it has with me.