the kingdom of the heart

what gets me through when i have nothing left

Thank you for your support, dear one! I marvel at your presence here, in a space where voices abound and attention is a priceless gift. As my direction becomes more defined, i will be announcing a new sacred project that will partially unfold in this space. If you’ve not become a Subscriber yet, i hope you will consider supporting my work in whatever way feels aligned for you, and share it with other wild souls who may resonate and/or feel challenged by these ideas.

I know there is another way to live.
When I find it, the angels
will cry out in rapture,
each cell of my body
will be a rose, a star.
--Morgan Farley 

Dearest Human,

Inside you beats a wild and alive heart. Not only biologically or physiologically alive, but ALIVE with energetic threads so fine, so tensile, malleable, beautiful, nearly undetectable unless you pause to feel them. Tune in with the delicate touch of holding life’s more fragile offerings – a robin’s egg, a papery champagne poppy just bloomed, the head of an infant. And beyond them the wide and glorious Field, a web of connection where Life disperses its force like a prism breaks into rainbow.  

Antelope Canyon by Omer Salom

I was playing with my daughters in the tub a few days ago, which is usually incredibly fun for me, but this was the end of the day, and i was the kind of fatigued that takes down empires. I sat there, a crumbling abandoned structure, while my girls chattered and splashed each other, A the baby up on her fat and adorably peachypink little legs, G holding down the big sister fort with her explanations of droplet dispersion: you just skim your fingers on the surface. Like this, mama. Like this, sister. She is teaching me something so delicate, i have to fully inhabit this aching motherbody to really practice, to be with her. My initial flash is i’m just so tired, i don’t want to play.  Then, the guilt, the commanding voice that reminds me my responsibility is to be present with my children. No. Matter. What.

This voice has had the most sway over me – the voice of must, of should, the emperor of my inner hierarchy. He’s in my head, sharp and urging, and it is with my head that i acquiesce and summon the energy from a place so distant it feels like it never quite arrives to animate my body, and yet, there have been decades of this, a pathway is well worn-- i rise and go do.

But i am not the same woman or the same mother of even a year ago, so i notice this voice, this ache of pressure, and i notice that i know how to rise to it. I also notice a pause in me. And, in that pause, an endless string of possibilities opens up. I follow the thread of one that takes me right into my heart space, where love and grief and loneliness sit together in this moment.

This moment,

where i have to summon something i don’t have

to be the mother my daughters need me to be,

and i wish to weep and rage and grow a pair of wings that can send me into the sky to roam alone for a while and feel the being inside the sorrow.

Parents out there, you get me.

And there in the heart, as the prayer of rage and love tre(m)bles its notes into me, i feel a little doorway,

a tiny crack,

an opening of light,

like a glittering thread i find myself tugging.

It is an answer arising from the same place – the endless kingdom of the heart. Or as the Greeks called it, the nous, the mind in the heart, or the eye of the heart. Jesus, and later Mary Magdalene, spoke of it as the place of our treasure. 

Beautiful human, how to tell you what i sensed, saw, felt there?

The crack opened into the most spacious place, where light of different frequencies and densities and colors with no names murmured, where everything was pulsing, alive, nourished, and whole, and the energy of this place poured out like honey, nurturing all, from wild wheeling stars to bacteria, from oak seedlings to baby slots to narwhals to humans.

I found myself already connected there by those gossamer filaments of my heart, and suddenly all this light was pouring into me, milk honey and rose, and the essence of something so heady it could not be described, except Jesus came to mind again on not putting new wine in old skins. Ahhhh, this was the new wine.

My body filled with radiance (which in this world’s time probably happened in a few seconds, though i felt the eternity in the drop) and G turned to me to say, mommy, your eyes shine like the ocean waves when the moon touches them. (i know! 😭 may we all learn to be poets like our children!) And though i feel sheepish sharing this here, i know that all of me was shining, licked clean by this sudden knowing that fell upon me like grace:

I was not alone.

I did not need to summon something that wasn’t mine already.

That Life wishes to life through us, and waits at the door and knocks.

May we follow that golden thread back to her,

to the primordial sound that was uttered at our birth,

the orgasmic pouring out of existential light into flesh

bone artery and neuron.

In a stunning interview with Tami Simon, cosmologist Jude Currivan poetically explains that our understanding of the universe as random is being disproved by the latest experiments in quantum mechanics. She invites us to consider that “instead of a chaotic big bang, [the universe] began as I describe it as the first moment of an exquisitely fine-tuned, amazingly ordered, and meaningful big breath, an ongoing big breath.

So ever since, as space has expanded, and times flow from past to present to future, that big breath of our universe has continued. And so our universe is being shown with evidence at all scales of existence now and across many fields of research to meaningfully exist and purposefully evolve.”

WOW.

I love it when science catches up to what children, mystics, and sages already know.

May we come alive in the wonder of this.

May we inhabit this reality we already know deep into our DNA that the Universe is Connection. Beauty. Love. Belonging.

May the obstacles to this knowing melt in the burn of your exquisite heart, vital and wondrously breakable, singing its clear and unrepeatable note.