I woke up this morning with my heart and spirit feeling even more open and squishy than usual. Rather like a lobster having just shed its shell. On days like these, it’s as though I hover just below the surface of a good cry. Not sorrowful tears, but the sort that are born of an overflowing of what’s inside. Like there’s just not quite enough room in this little body for all that is welling up. I’m not even sure how to name it. Love, maybe, like the Agape version I learned about in Sunday School? The kind that is for everyone and everything. It hurts just a little, but with that sort of light, persistent tug that comes just to let you know it’s there.
I sat with my coffee, things to do but a compulsion to write. As I opened up my laptop, the web browser filled with one of the social media platforms, I saw a post that reminded me that today is the Autumnal Equinox. Never mind that it also comes on the heels of Monday night’s Harvest Moon. I don’t follow closely or understand completely how the movement of heavenly bodies impacts human energy and spirit, and it’s above my pay grade to understand how The Creator has connected it all. But I have gathered enough evidence through personal experience over the years to be clear that there is certainly something to it. A quick internet search on the topic uncovered this. “The Spiritual Significance of the Autumn Equinox can be referred to as our journey to perceive all information or observation only from the channels of our heart and not logic.” Well, that would certainly explain the “oh-golly-I’m-not-sure-I-can-keep-it-all-in-my-heart” thing. I think my “channels” might be at flood stage.
Unlike hearts, minds, and the egos that reside in them, are quite vulnerable to infection. Prejudice, judgment, hatred, anger, apathy, and a myriad of other bugs can easily take hold. And in this age of man, it seems this sort of “illness” has reached pandemic proportions among us. I mourn the losses, tangible and intangible, that continue to pile up as a result.
But it is not so with hearts. Hearts are immune to pathogens such as these. Hearts can be hidden away, ignored, oppressed, but never spoiled. I often wonder about what would happen if we all began, in earnest, to observe the world through the lens of our heart instead of that of our mind. And on a day like today, I don’t just wonder, I pray that we might. That we will. And that when we do, love will well up and overflow in a flood.
And I bet hate can’t swim in a love river.