Following My Heart’s Footsteps
Sunday, December 16th, 2007“It is, I now understand, a story that has no clear beginning or end, but, like the blood itself, keeps coming back around, full circle.
In each heart, at one time, two motions, the spent blood returning even as the renewed rushes out.
At one time, in each heart - yours, mine, at this very instant - two leanings, two dispositions, two emotions: the urge to go to the very edges of our existence followed by that dire sensation of having gone too far, of being way out on a limb and needing, at all costs, to get back home.
In each heart, at one time, both thrust and thrust’s acceptance, an ongoing, self-contained act of inner coition that at once mimes and moves the outward one to its perfectly mindless redundancy. More and more now I know the outer world to be a recapitulation of our own inner biology.
Outside, the city slumbers along with my brain. I’ve just doubled back on it, followed my heart’s footsteps back around to what I’d taken such pains to escape, found myself standing before some late-night, domino-lit office tower, dead migratory birds strewn at its base.
Where, then, to begin? At what point in the heart’s motion to intercede without disrupting that ongoing simultaneity? It has a mind of its own, the heart, for which our minds have yet to find the words.”
- From “A Man After His Own Heart” by Charles Siebert
