Living by Heart and Body

I have been experiencing illness again, a deep and uncertain illness that has brought me face to face with my mortality and the messages of my heart.

What I have discovered is that my heart wants simple things. She wants to be, and experience, and live. I have visions of places where I want to go, things I want to see and smell, and one person that I want to sit beside again. He is someone I've never been able to talk to about my feelings because I was afraid of my heart.

As my symptoms cycle around, I have come to trust my connection to the divine in my body. I know I live in the heart of God. I have sobbed in gratitude from this knowing, and in grief for the years it has taken me to fully understand. I have come to recognize that the heart doesn't ask you to be perfectly ready or have things perfectly positioned before you live. You live now. You live from your heart the moment you understand what she is revealing to you, and you experience it through your body. There is nothing to fear.

And so I have been taking my medicine and stretching and resting, and also quitting things that don't fit. I have written to the man I want to sit beside and shared how it's been. He wrote a short, direct, warm response and it's like we skipped a few steps, backed into the corner of potential loss. There is love that lives between us, in some fashion.

I said to myself, "Oh, so this is how it is. This is how it's going to be."

Living from the heart is not peak experiences or butterflies. It is being Home, in perfect contentment. It is deep peace. I did not know that.

I am not sure how I will endure the months and months of uncertainty until I can see him, but I know it is not about waiting; it is about living. I get to wake up every morning and take my medicine, and stretch and rest, and feel an overwhelmingly peaceful love in my whole body that brings me to tears. I get to do things every day that bring me Home, knowing that the day when I get to sit beside this man will be all the sweeter for it. Life will be like water.

Living, true living, is only encountered through the heart and body. May I -- and all of us -- live our stories through exquisite taste, touch, smell, and tenderness. When I recover, I intend to continue this new chapter with everything in me, with my hands and my laughter. I will be able to say I have lived.