"Every Heart His Hand Created..."

Today the tests began in earnest. My heart was looked at in every way I can conceive of it being peered at, without the use and aid of a scalpel.

There was a big machine that tracked a radioactive isotope around and thru the cavities of my heart, a treadmill that forced my heart to gallop at breakneck speeds, and a machine that looked at my heart thru the miracle of sonar. The young woman in charge of the treadmill gave me a painstakingly thorough explanation, as though the device were beyond my comprehension, and I, with some small measure of pride…responded that “yes, despite my appearance to the contrary, I will be able to do 10 minutes on the treadmill…after all, I do 95 minutes on the mountains to and from the water tower four times every week”. Ten minutes later, with my self aggrandizing hubris laying shredded around my ankles like so many wisps of broken bumblebee wings, I understood just how slowly it is I make my way up that mountain….and how fast a treadmill, with consummate indifference, can force you to move.

This office with its, death defying treadmill, is 19 Doctors strong and so well functioning it moves you about their complex domain like pieces on a chessboard, being wielded by a Master chessman. Go here, do this, don’t do that, sit here, wait some more…

At one point in all the moving and testing and the many expectations that were required of me, I was positioned just so, for the sonar tech to be able to bounce sound off my heart and measure it’s many cavities and depths. The manner of my much-adjusted posture, allowed me to see the computer screen as clearly as she could, and thus, to watch my own beating heart.

I have seen this type of procedure many times on TV and in the movies, when the pediatrician peers at the baby’s tiny fluttering heart…and I can only imagine how that must feel, now that I have seen my beating heart as well.

The room was soothingly dark, the tech blessedly silent, and some form of opera, or choral music, was playing softly in the background as I watched my heart performing its rhythmical service.

As I lay there in the quiet and lyrical semi-darkness, I was overcome with gratitude for the service my heart has so committedly provided me, all these long years. It went to that depth of gratitude that is normally reserved for the presence of my Teacher and his great and deep calm. And that level of gratitude…always…makes me cry. Laying there in my twisted, posed, and uncomfortable posture, alone with my experience of the deepening expansion of gratitude, I felt tears gathering and spilling over the bridge of my nose to join the stream from my other eye as they both traveled toward my ear.

Somehow looking inside my body at my beating heart, gave me to know just how much service it has provided me. The long years of my private hell, the war of wars that waged in my broken mind for so many years, the active way in which I disregarded what would be best for my heart, in favor of what served my egoic mind’s neediness and the constant search for external approval…a mind at war with a heart, was the condition of almost three decades of my life.

Now that Silence has given me the continuing development of control, over my thinking mind and I am no longer flung about like a tiny rowboat tossed against deadly sea cliffs, I can see the source of Silent Service that was born with me into the world in the form of my Heart, drumming out its lifetime of service and care.

Wiki answers tells me that your heart can be seen beating when you are considerably smaller than a kidney bean, a mere five weeks beyond your conception.

I have always thought the Heart of Courage, or Caring, or Kindness was a metaphorical one…but now I think perhaps it is coded into our cellular structure.

I was born into the hellfire and damnation tradition of religion, by which all children are defined as condemned by the act of conception…the “Original Sin” that gives rise to beating children for their own betterment. That notion, along with virulent self-hatred, was left behind me long years ago, and its place taken by the Buddhist conception of “basic goodness”.

In the Buddhist tradition you, and I, and all of life… are defined as born good, and I saw today that the truth of basic goodness rests in the silent rhythms of your heart and mine. Protected from the confusion of a mind split asunder, your hearth, your haven, your hope and your help…is silently beating under your breastbone awaiting your awakening.

In the Buddhist tradition all beings are born good, and it is only the confusion of minds unraveling with self-inflicted illusions, that allow for “monsters” to walk among us. The rapists, murderers, child molesters and all forms of “evil” are merely now at to far a distance, warped by the confusion of the thinking mind, to hear the soft thrumming of their own heart.

“One learns through the heart, not the eyes or the intellect. God has put something noble and good in every heart his hand created.” – Mark Twain

Every heart that takes up the beating work of a lifetime has at it’s core, and perhaps even as the reason for which it beats, a noble and good thing… buried somewhere within.

“Your vision will become clear only when you look into your heart. Who looks outside, dreams. Who looks inside, awakens.” – C.G. Jung.

To stop searching among the rubble and debris of external circumstance for our purpose, our value, or our inherent goodness is the first step on the long journey home…it begins the transformation that allows us to know in the depths of our heart that the “descent is for the sake of the ascent.” – Ageless Wisdom Proverb

In the healed mind, the heart takes the lead and is transformed from unnoticed servant to its rightful position of supremacy and clarity…”who looks outside” creates for himself heart breaking and un-fulfillable longing, he “who looks inside” creates strength of will, character, clarity, and finally and truly… “A full heart with room enough for everything, or if not, an empty heart with room for nothing.” - Antonio Porchia