Japan Photo Diary: 132 (memories of winter 2)

Spill (There’s No War in World)

Tammy T. Stone

 

Spilling Heart

(Thailand)

 

A woman loses her heart and must go off in search of it. Doctors can’t find anything wrong but she knows they’re mistaken.

This would be a very vivid dream or movie of the week. I can imagine I am the protagonist. I have to make the startling discovery that my heart is missing. Was it ever there? I look inside of myself, maybe with a tiny camera like the ones doctors use to perform radical surgeries inside kneecaps and within shoulder blades.

Or maybe I’m searching with my mind’s eye, as per the directions of any one of several guided meditations. I know one, where you imagine your left eye is the moon, and your right eye is the sun, and you picture them merging at your third eye, or the middle of your forehead, and it becomes a luminescent entity like a flashlight that you can use for probing of a deep, immersive kind. I highly recommend it.

So I go there, inside, wade through the cavities and capillaries and mucus, the bones and my thin, airy blood. And I find it, what I’ve suspected for a long time, as far as I remember being conscious. The gaping hole where my heart should be. If this were a dream, I would wake up in sweats and not be able to shake the feeling that the dream was real. I’d talk to my friends about the significance of this dream, already knowing what it must mean.

It’s so obvious. I don’t have my heart. I’m heartless. The word already speaks for itself. Symbolically, I have lost my ability to feel, have emotions, relate to others in the most basic, human way. I have no grounding, in other words, because a grounding in the head is no grounding at all. It is a life lived in some stratosphere away from where we can connect with what is real.

There is no field here, no grass, no sensation of soil sifting through fingers at the level of the mind. There are no broken hearts here. What grounds us more than a broken heart?

In any case, we can imagine a scenario in which this is not a dream, that the gaping hole where my heart should be really exists, you know, as an absence, a lack. It’s palpable, or tangible, or whatever word defines existence for you.

This is how it can feel sometimes.

But immediately I think of The Wizard of Oz and I feel less scared. The Scarecrow literally didn’t have a heart and wanted nothing more than to have one, and he sang and danced about it with such heart, and loved so wildly and freely!

The scarecrow was invented to teach us that we already have what we need inside. And this is absolutely true, and a profound spiritual truth.

I am strong and courageous and full of passion. I am also vulnerable, weak and at times, I absolutely fear the worst about who I am.

In other words, I am human, and as one of these, I have the ability to feel and observe so many things about myself, and how these things change constantly. I can embrace all of it. And this is a beautiful thing.