Hello there,
It is now March, but I’m still recovering from last month. February was not for the faint of heart. And yet, I feel fainthearted. Quite literally, I feel my heart is weaker, less robust. My heart, its function and capacity, has held much of my focus lately. In both tangible and immediate ways and in minutes and in long-arcs-of-time ways. “Can I run this far?” “Can I show up fully with this person?” “Can I read this and not turn my heart off?”
On my short run yesterday, almost all I thought about was my own heart’s effort. It’s beating, pumping, it’s effort at spinning blood through the chambers and out into circulation around my body, it’s responsibility for shifting pressurized fluid systems, for bringing what’s needed into an entire system and for removing what's no longer useful. It all seemed like more work than usual. And more work than one heart should be responsible for. It felt like bailing a boat with a teacup.
Sharing heart work, needing help, reaching a limit in my capacity, the effort and humility in being alive and not forever, needing to slow down to keep up… The metaphors kept coming. And the micro and macro expressions of what aliveness asks of us feels easy to recognize during these days, both locally and globally.
This focus on my heart is not separate from my very personal concerns: my father’s failing heart. And certainly plays a part in it. A focus that perhaps lets me stay close to what he might be experiencing. The week I spent with him recently was consumed with the ever-changing measurements and data about how his heart and kidneys were functioning and where his health was landing on the scales of working well to not working at all. The kidneys and heart have a deeply co-dependent relationship, it turns out. They need each other, and every change in one affects the health and function of the other. One medication may afford more health but comes at the cost of health in the other. Of course the relationship between any organs is a dance the whole body is moved by, but the heart and kidneys are in a serious tango. It was hard to feel much outside of the effort of his heart.
I look around where I live and see all these living creatures being pumped by their hearts. I imagine their different tempos, different shapes, excitedly beating quickly or barely beating at all, large and teeny tiny. Runners, dogs, birds, babies and mice. These precious pulsing hearts. The very first functioning organ that develops in our embryological embodiment, the pulse of which is measured to determine the first sign of life and its end. Our lifelong aches that signal love and loss. And its need for the other organs, other systems, just to keep on keepin’ on. The delicate interplay that can be manipulated in one direction or another but always at a cost to something. How delicate that interdependence is.
How our bodies work to stay alive and continue to endure the impact of loss of life and fullness of life, feels miraculous to me. And this month is teeming with tailor-made reminders.
Today this super simple pause really helped, so if you’re up for it and want to join me for a brief moment of contact… Place the palm of your hand on your beating heart. Feel its effort, its contraction and release, its singular rhythm. And here I send this message from my hand to my heart, “thank you, dear heart.” And then I feel into what’s there.
Marveling at your beating heart.