When your heart moves, move with it
I carried for over two years a crumpled fortune that read, “Wherever you go, go with all your heart.” At the time, I myopically took this to be about romantic relationships. It was at a time in my life when I felt both vulnerable and giddy in new love, when I lived abroad as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Uganda. The fortune also seemed to validate this insane late-adolescent decision that I had made to throw myself into a brand new culture for two years and see what happened. I repeated it to myself while the earth baked dry outside the cement house where I lived. I’m here, so my heart should be too. As if I could trick it.
I’m sitting here in my house, terrified. It is day 5 (6?) of true social-distancing here in Minnesota. It’s loud inside my head, so loud, that I’m surprised to hear a sudden and clear re-mix of that long-ago fortune swim like sunlight through me: When your heart moves, moves with it. See, the problem was never my heart. My heart has never had to be tricked or lured; it knows what it knows. It knows. Has your heart moved these last few days? Have you read or heard something frightening, something unbelievably beautiful? I can’t describe the acrobatics performed by the warm slip of life that is inside me, that is me. The part of me that reaches out, in pure longing, for others. It’s there, it’s there already, it’s right where it needs to be, where I need to be. And so, I follow it. I listen, amidst all the noise, confusion, and fear knocking my neurons sideways and lighting them on fire; I listen to her for dear life for where to go next.
I’m sitting here in my house, terrified. It is day 5 (6?) of true social-distancing here in Minnesota. It’s loud inside my head, so loud, that I’m surprised to hear a sudden and clear re-mix of that long-ago fortune swim like sunlight through me: When your heart moves, moves with it. See, the problem was never my heart. My heart has never had to be tricked or lured; it knows what it knows. It knows. Has your heart moved these last few days? Have you read or heard something frightening, something unbelievably beautiful? I can’t describe the acrobatics performed by the warm slip of life that is inside me, that is me. The part of me that reaches out, in pure longing, for others. It’s there, it’s there already, it’s right where it needs to be, where I need to be. And so, I follow it. I listen, amidst all the noise, confusion, and fear knocking my neurons sideways and lighting them on fire; I listen to her for dear life for where to go next.
Love this ❤️
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