The crisp grass, amber and pale green, made a quiet sound as I spread out my blankets. Sunbathing in the cold winter light, another pile of blankets pulled over me and stretched up to my neck. It must be a strange scene, lying out on a winter day in the public park. In my nest I can look at the sky. I am in a quiet place within myself and imagine how my body appears from the tree above. A leaf falls onto my face, startling me, but I keep my eyes closed. A daydream layered on top of the heaviness of my weary body.
Since January of this year I’ve had three damaged veins removed from my body. It’s hard to describe the sensation and awareness of all that stagnant blood, idle and without purpose, suddenly missing. Finally returning. A fullness that is growing.
Some ancient texts refer to resting awareness in the “heart points” but they never quite explain what this means.
I can’t stop thinking about them. And I keep I finding myself within the chambers of my heart, as if I can see all four at once.
I watch the blue, oxygen depleted blood move from my heart to the lungs, turning to purple, then red, and returning to the heart. Heard and felt within a single heartbeat. A single moment.
What could be more unconditional than that?
Can I show you? (a possible route to the heart)
What has returned?
I can feel it moving. Waves of sensation. My breath a circular movement around the still point.
The rhythm of the earth is slower in the winter, I realize that now. The ground is harder and colder of course, unyielding but for the time surrounding a soaking rain or melting snow. Beneath that there is still a tenderness.
You have to quiet your mind enough to listen. And quiet your heart enough to feel. Eventually you can find the cosmic hum deep in the earth where the feeling of weightedness and floating seem to converge.
Have I been confusing my heart as a place of giving, when really it is a space of receiving?
Is the body only a vessel for the heart?
Does the ground know that these tears are mine? Or do they belong to you?
Perhaps they are the ones who love us first.
When I come back, sometimes I wake up too quickly. I don’t always want to come back, to tell you the truth.
The light has changed. My dog is snoring beside me.
Thick black whiskers extend confidently from dark spots on his snout, which is white besides a couple patches where his skin peaks through. His lips just slightly separated, so his jagged breaths don’t disturb their stillness. Eyes squeezed shut, the lower lid of one of them is pushed up awkwardly by a bunched section in the blanket.
I roll onto my side and press my ear against his back. Listening.
Such a simple action, but it breaks my heart— to know that each of these moments will slip away, even as I try to hold onto them.
As I placed my hand on his chest I could feel his heartbeat. And I wondered if his thread traveled to the same place, if it twisted with mine.
I wondered what would happen to his thread when the time came.
I wondered if a memory would be enough.
I listened carefully until I found it, and traveled along the edge.
I wanted to feel the dream itself but I could only listen. To the sound of breath moving
his and mine.