Here's a poem by Mark Nepo about and from the heart: "You ask, how much can one heart hold, as I lift a rock worn by the stream to its beauty by holding onto nothing. For all the ways we resist, each soul by the weight of its fundamental being, brings us to the bottom of things, where we are worn smooth. I think this abrasion of life force is a form of inner erosion that each person experiences here on earth. Finally it's letting go that lets us rest on the bottom. You ask, and all I can say, is that teachers wait in the center of every moment to show us that though there are many places to go, they all lead to the same ground of being we all share. In this way, we run through the world, only to be worn to a common center, in which we recognize each other at last." Actually, I think this poem speaks to both the heart and the soul; that they both are the "common center" that allows us to "recognize each other at last." They are the essential elements of our humanity that binds us irrevocably to each other and to all sentient beings.
Ed, thank you for sharing this lovely passage by Mark Nero and your reflections on it. I'm touched by Nepo's line: "Finally it's letting go that lets us rest on the bottom . . . the same ground of being we all share." What beauty to find that when we let go of all we are holding onto, we come to our "common center" that, as you echo, allows us to "recognize each other at last." He is offering us the pearl of great price, that in letting go, we come to the "essential elements of our humanity that binds us irrevocably to each other and all sentient beings." 🙏❤️
Another long comment from me. Your posts fill me with "seeing" on these Sunday mornings we spend together:). And now if only I could live into it!
I feel my breath, and my heart, soften reading this—like you’ve placed a hand on the doorframe of the temple and are gently inviting us in. There’s something in your writing that invites not only reflection but an embodied stillness—a pause where I notice sensation as well as thought.
Your words reminded me of that old Taoist text (which you likely pointed me to in another of your writings), The Secret of the Golden Flower, and its simple yet potent teaching: turn the light around. Not as effort, but as a returning—of attention, of spirit, of presence. To dwell within the “eternal silence between two beats” is to feel what that text describes as the movement of light returning to its source, the soul circling home. It’s not hard to imagine Hermes standing right there, just beyond the threshold, smiling.
And then Wordsworth’s lines lit up in me:
“Trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!”
There’s something in what you’re writing that brings these ancient voices together. You’re helping us remember not only what we’ve forgotten, but why we forgot. The turning away from the heart wasn’t a simple mistake of philosophy—it was a movement of culture, of fear, of fragmentation, of trauma. Perhaps, even, the cost of the Mental Structure of consciousness? But now, we are being called to turn back—not as children, but as conscious stewards of the heart. No easy feat! Perhaps to be a steward of the heart means learning to abide in its rhythms, to attune to what is subtle and alive, to feel and follow its coherence even when the world pulls us elsewhere. It is so good to have you, all of us, as companions along the way.
Your image of the philosopher and the physician once intertwined—like serpents on Hermes’ staff—is one I will carry. It seems to me to be the perfect image of the "wisdom way of knowing." It speaks to the deep integration we are longing for. Not just wisdom about the heart, but the felt wisdom within it. I sense that this is the work of what I call Advocacy of the Heart too: to live in the unseen chamber, where light circulates and silence speaks—to open to presence as teacher, to let the intelligence of the heart guide the whole.
Dear Toni, once again, your words give me lengthy pause. Thank you for reading through the eye of the heart as we spend Sunday morning together. It seems to me in reading you that you are living it, Toni.
I appreciate you sharing that this series is "helping us remember not only what we've forgotten, but why we've forgotten." This is my hope. From reading you, I get the sense that the story-telling does not ask us to abandon the heart in favor of Mental Structure mentations. This, too, is my hope for this shared exploration.
That said, I'm going to take us right into the Mental Structure to respond to your question about "a cost of the Mental Structure." I have been of two minds here. One is that if the unique role of the human is not only consciousness experiencing itself through life but consciousness reflecting on itself, then the separation perception that emerges in the Mental Structure is wholly necessary for consciousness to reflect on itself. It's no accident. The other "mind" points to your comment about a movement of culture, fear, fragmentation, trauma. Separation consciousness does not seem to be universal to the emergence of the Mental Structure. Take, for example, the Mental Structure ways of being in the pre-Colonial Americas. Grossly, generally speaking, the heart (Mythic) and body (Archaic–Magic) do not seem to be exiled but integrated into the emergent Mental. . . . We do not know how this might have unfolded because of "contact." I do not want to oversimplify ways of being but to wonder why the Mental Structure, generally speaking, seems to be expressed differently across the Americas and Mesopotamia and ancient Greece. But it was the fragmentation expression that took hold. I'm not sure that I align with Gebser's Eurocentric view on this. . . . But I digress with hopes that this, too, when taken into contemplation, serves to invoke the heart longing to be recalled.
We are companions in your luminous work of the Advocacy of the Heart so beautifully expressed here.
Renée, it feels like it's been a while... Love this exploration. And how synchronistic, I wrote a note the other day on the heart. I was looking into how physically and scientifically our hearts are more than organs pumping blood through our veins, they actually have their own intricate nervous system along with an ongoing bidirectional dialogue with the brain. This makes me ponder haven’t the mystics and philosophers been talking about the heart’s role in our consciousness and wisdom for millennia. It's how we connect and love, reminding us to listen to our hearts! As Rumi said, "Your heart knows the way. Run in that direction."
And we do have to die before we die. To reconnect with the heat. Seems like many systems, philosophies and religions have an underworld story of some sort. I've been diving into the old Sumerian one of Inanna/Ishtar. We do have to relinquish our adornments and accoutrements to enter the underworld. To take off the masks, leave pretense to the wayside. How else can anything else enter if we are so heavily guarded. Here the heart and soul can speak its soft whispers. Where truth is understood not as binary but through paradox and cycles. Where reason and logic are only part of the picture not the whole shebang.
Julie, it is good to connect here and around the heart. . . . Thank you. The synchronicity seems to me to be no accident, as if the consciousness of the heart is reawakening, long covered over by our prioritizing the mind. The consciousness of the heart reaches toward us, calls our name, you in your contemplations on Inanna/Ishtar. These are manifestions, it seems. The mystics have long been onto the secret, as you say, that the path to the heart is the underworld. "Here the heart and soul can speak its soft whispers." Thank you for this.
Fabulous. The clarity with which you tell this story is masterful; the elegance absolutely Divine. Couldn't be more timely. Thank you, dear Renée--this is the perfect launch for my journey this day.
Dear Renée, whereas my brain appears to have turned to mush as I have taken a sacred pause over the last two months, I just wanted to wave from my chrysalis until I can bring forth more words of appreciation. From a butterfly in the making. 🦋
Louise, it is always so good to see you here, dear Friend, and always an honor to feel your kind and loving presence. I am sending love nourishment to the chrysalis and I honor you for taking this time. You show us a way to wings. . . . 🙏
This meditation is so appreciated today. And I wish I could share it with my dad—a heart surgeon well aware of and humbled by the mysticism of the heart. I’ve been reflecting on silence/wordlessness this week and how maybe the very medium all communication travels through might be love. Love as the original fabric of the universe. Like you say, “The heart is the archē, the origin of being. All else moves to and fro, in and out.”
I also found myself, while reading this, thinking about Adyashanti’s Resurrecting Jesus: Embodying the Spirit of a Revolutionary Mystic. A memorable work that restores the heart and love to the center of all our spiritual longing. You might enjoy it, if you haven’t read it already!
Kimberly, and so your dad and I meet on the page again. What a joy it would be to have met your father, to have conversations with him, to wonder aloud what it is to hold the living heart in the cup of your hand. I imagine how humbling this experience must be. And I echo you, that Love is the original fabric of the universe. We seem to have an intuitive sense of this. It is beyond words. I see and have saved "in defense of nothing to say" and look forward, as always, to reading your reflections--this week, on silence/wordlessness. How our paths intertwine. . . .
Thank you for recommending Adyashanti's book. I have not read it.
Holy Shit, Renee (and that expression came so strongly I had to express it). This was a bolt of lightening--or a dagger--right at something that has been troubling me a lot, and something I was discussing w/a group of friends (who are philosophically inclined) on Friday. We were discussing the (re-)rise of the concept of "Narrative" in post-modern life, lit, medicine, etc. . I was bemoaning how I feel increasingly irrelevant in today's culture--how I don't relate or sometimes even understand the Younger Generation's writing, conversation, concepts; how it seems to me that everything is parsed, quickly tagged and then moved on past, and even our conversations are like Tik-Toc experiences--blips not meant to be dwelt on or chewed and digested. It feels almost like we're AI creations--in a basically solopsistic existence w/connections that are made, analyzed for the "meaning" (i.e., rational assessment) within our databases, judged accordingly without allowing time for any real depth of impact, and acted upon thusly. Emotional content? no-no-no not-so-much. See how the culture wave is trying to repress anything that makes one uncomfortable, rather than studying it, examining responses, and diving into the whys and wherefores so things can be--transmuted--I love that word--into a new part of our humanity. In short, I've felt that we've lost Heart.
So I appreciate your writing to day more than I can say (though I've already said a mouthful). Thank you--I have real clarification for my thoughts. You are a gem, and I'm glad to have the opportunity to interact with you.
Brenda, I have been so stirred with the same (?) bolt of lightening by your comment that I have returned to it a few times before responding! I find myself nodding whole-bodied to your words. You've not only brilliantly clarified today's style of communication. You've fleshed it out exquisitely. What really grabbed me is the parallelism you make between today's conversation style and Tik-Toc experiences: "blips not meant to be dwelt on or chewed or digested," let alone the experiences of one another transmuted between us. My mind keeps drifting to images of whole families sitting at a restaurant table, no one looking at anyone but the phones in their palms, thumbs in perpetual motion, scrolling video blips, and the sadness that always washes through me when I see life lived lonely in parallel virtuality. It is heartening that small segments of a younger generation are abandoning the smartphone in favor of the flip phone, of reading or a picnic in a park without technology, of knitting, and so on: the next generation luddites. . . .
Toward the end of his life, Teilhard began to intimate that after the noosphere (the sphere of thought [and now AI] that emerged on Earth in the human long after the emergence of the biosphere), something akin to what Louis Savary has called a kardiasphere would form, calling forth the Heart into the world. The recognition that we have lost Heart is a recognition called forth and lived through the Heart itself. The Heart calls us to one another. And when we meet in this way, the kardiasphere has more substance to it. It becomes an evolutionary force in the world. If this helps, I say, take Heart, dear Friend. You and I are not irrelevant. We are laying the ground of Heart.
Thank you for this, Brenda. It is always a joy to hear from you, and thank you for sending that sister of yours over here beyond the comfort zone!
Here's a poem by Mark Nepo about and from the heart: "You ask, how much can one heart hold, as I lift a rock worn by the stream to its beauty by holding onto nothing. For all the ways we resist, each soul by the weight of its fundamental being, brings us to the bottom of things, where we are worn smooth. I think this abrasion of life force is a form of inner erosion that each person experiences here on earth. Finally it's letting go that lets us rest on the bottom. You ask, and all I can say, is that teachers wait in the center of every moment to show us that though there are many places to go, they all lead to the same ground of being we all share. In this way, we run through the world, only to be worn to a common center, in which we recognize each other at last." Actually, I think this poem speaks to both the heart and the soul; that they both are the "common center" that allows us to "recognize each other at last." They are the essential elements of our humanity that binds us irrevocably to each other and to all sentient beings.
Ed, thank you for sharing this lovely passage by Mark Nero and your reflections on it. I'm touched by Nepo's line: "Finally it's letting go that lets us rest on the bottom . . . the same ground of being we all share." What beauty to find that when we let go of all we are holding onto, we come to our "common center" that, as you echo, allows us to "recognize each other at last." He is offering us the pearl of great price, that in letting go, we come to the "essential elements of our humanity that binds us irrevocably to each other and all sentient beings." 🙏❤️
Dear Renée,
Another long comment from me. Your posts fill me with "seeing" on these Sunday mornings we spend together:). And now if only I could live into it!
I feel my breath, and my heart, soften reading this—like you’ve placed a hand on the doorframe of the temple and are gently inviting us in. There’s something in your writing that invites not only reflection but an embodied stillness—a pause where I notice sensation as well as thought.
Your words reminded me of that old Taoist text (which you likely pointed me to in another of your writings), The Secret of the Golden Flower, and its simple yet potent teaching: turn the light around. Not as effort, but as a returning—of attention, of spirit, of presence. To dwell within the “eternal silence between two beats” is to feel what that text describes as the movement of light returning to its source, the soul circling home. It’s not hard to imagine Hermes standing right there, just beyond the threshold, smiling.
And then Wordsworth’s lines lit up in me:
“Trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!”
There’s something in what you’re writing that brings these ancient voices together. You’re helping us remember not only what we’ve forgotten, but why we forgot. The turning away from the heart wasn’t a simple mistake of philosophy—it was a movement of culture, of fear, of fragmentation, of trauma. Perhaps, even, the cost of the Mental Structure of consciousness? But now, we are being called to turn back—not as children, but as conscious stewards of the heart. No easy feat! Perhaps to be a steward of the heart means learning to abide in its rhythms, to attune to what is subtle and alive, to feel and follow its coherence even when the world pulls us elsewhere. It is so good to have you, all of us, as companions along the way.
Your image of the philosopher and the physician once intertwined—like serpents on Hermes’ staff—is one I will carry. It seems to me to be the perfect image of the "wisdom way of knowing." It speaks to the deep integration we are longing for. Not just wisdom about the heart, but the felt wisdom within it. I sense that this is the work of what I call Advocacy of the Heart too: to live in the unseen chamber, where light circulates and silence speaks—to open to presence as teacher, to let the intelligence of the heart guide the whole.
With gratitude for your leading,
Toni
Dear Toni, once again, your words give me lengthy pause. Thank you for reading through the eye of the heart as we spend Sunday morning together. It seems to me in reading you that you are living it, Toni.
I appreciate you sharing that this series is "helping us remember not only what we've forgotten, but why we've forgotten." This is my hope. From reading you, I get the sense that the story-telling does not ask us to abandon the heart in favor of Mental Structure mentations. This, too, is my hope for this shared exploration.
That said, I'm going to take us right into the Mental Structure to respond to your question about "a cost of the Mental Structure." I have been of two minds here. One is that if the unique role of the human is not only consciousness experiencing itself through life but consciousness reflecting on itself, then the separation perception that emerges in the Mental Structure is wholly necessary for consciousness to reflect on itself. It's no accident. The other "mind" points to your comment about a movement of culture, fear, fragmentation, trauma. Separation consciousness does not seem to be universal to the emergence of the Mental Structure. Take, for example, the Mental Structure ways of being in the pre-Colonial Americas. Grossly, generally speaking, the heart (Mythic) and body (Archaic–Magic) do not seem to be exiled but integrated into the emergent Mental. . . . We do not know how this might have unfolded because of "contact." I do not want to oversimplify ways of being but to wonder why the Mental Structure, generally speaking, seems to be expressed differently across the Americas and Mesopotamia and ancient Greece. But it was the fragmentation expression that took hold. I'm not sure that I align with Gebser's Eurocentric view on this. . . . But I digress with hopes that this, too, when taken into contemplation, serves to invoke the heart longing to be recalled.
We are companions in your luminous work of the Advocacy of the Heart so beautifully expressed here.
Renée, it feels like it's been a while... Love this exploration. And how synchronistic, I wrote a note the other day on the heart. I was looking into how physically and scientifically our hearts are more than organs pumping blood through our veins, they actually have their own intricate nervous system along with an ongoing bidirectional dialogue with the brain. This makes me ponder haven’t the mystics and philosophers been talking about the heart’s role in our consciousness and wisdom for millennia. It's how we connect and love, reminding us to listen to our hearts! As Rumi said, "Your heart knows the way. Run in that direction."
And we do have to die before we die. To reconnect with the heat. Seems like many systems, philosophies and religions have an underworld story of some sort. I've been diving into the old Sumerian one of Inanna/Ishtar. We do have to relinquish our adornments and accoutrements to enter the underworld. To take off the masks, leave pretense to the wayside. How else can anything else enter if we are so heavily guarded. Here the heart and soul can speak its soft whispers. Where truth is understood not as binary but through paradox and cycles. Where reason and logic are only part of the picture not the whole shebang.
Julie, it is good to connect here and around the heart. . . . Thank you. The synchronicity seems to me to be no accident, as if the consciousness of the heart is reawakening, long covered over by our prioritizing the mind. The consciousness of the heart reaches toward us, calls our name, you in your contemplations on Inanna/Ishtar. These are manifestions, it seems. The mystics have long been onto the secret, as you say, that the path to the heart is the underworld. "Here the heart and soul can speak its soft whispers." Thank you for this.
Fabulous. The clarity with which you tell this story is masterful; the elegance absolutely Divine. Couldn't be more timely. Thank you, dear Renée--this is the perfect launch for my journey this day.
Dear Becky, thank you, and of course, I was with you. 🙏❤️
Dear Renée, whereas my brain appears to have turned to mush as I have taken a sacred pause over the last two months, I just wanted to wave from my chrysalis until I can bring forth more words of appreciation. From a butterfly in the making. 🦋
Louise, it is always so good to see you here, dear Friend, and always an honor to feel your kind and loving presence. I am sending love nourishment to the chrysalis and I honor you for taking this time. You show us a way to wings. . . . 🙏
This meditation is so appreciated today. And I wish I could share it with my dad—a heart surgeon well aware of and humbled by the mysticism of the heart. I’ve been reflecting on silence/wordlessness this week and how maybe the very medium all communication travels through might be love. Love as the original fabric of the universe. Like you say, “The heart is the archē, the origin of being. All else moves to and fro, in and out.”
I also found myself, while reading this, thinking about Adyashanti’s Resurrecting Jesus: Embodying the Spirit of a Revolutionary Mystic. A memorable work that restores the heart and love to the center of all our spiritual longing. You might enjoy it, if you haven’t read it already!
Kimberly, and so your dad and I meet on the page again. What a joy it would be to have met your father, to have conversations with him, to wonder aloud what it is to hold the living heart in the cup of your hand. I imagine how humbling this experience must be. And I echo you, that Love is the original fabric of the universe. We seem to have an intuitive sense of this. It is beyond words. I see and have saved "in defense of nothing to say" and look forward, as always, to reading your reflections--this week, on silence/wordlessness. How our paths intertwine. . . .
Thank you for recommending Adyashanti's book. I have not read it.
Holy Shit, Renee (and that expression came so strongly I had to express it). This was a bolt of lightening--or a dagger--right at something that has been troubling me a lot, and something I was discussing w/a group of friends (who are philosophically inclined) on Friday. We were discussing the (re-)rise of the concept of "Narrative" in post-modern life, lit, medicine, etc. . I was bemoaning how I feel increasingly irrelevant in today's culture--how I don't relate or sometimes even understand the Younger Generation's writing, conversation, concepts; how it seems to me that everything is parsed, quickly tagged and then moved on past, and even our conversations are like Tik-Toc experiences--blips not meant to be dwelt on or chewed and digested. It feels almost like we're AI creations--in a basically solopsistic existence w/connections that are made, analyzed for the "meaning" (i.e., rational assessment) within our databases, judged accordingly without allowing time for any real depth of impact, and acted upon thusly. Emotional content? no-no-no not-so-much. See how the culture wave is trying to repress anything that makes one uncomfortable, rather than studying it, examining responses, and diving into the whys and wherefores so things can be--transmuted--I love that word--into a new part of our humanity. In short, I've felt that we've lost Heart.
So I appreciate your writing to day more than I can say (though I've already said a mouthful). Thank you--I have real clarification for my thoughts. You are a gem, and I'm glad to have the opportunity to interact with you.
Brenda, I have been so stirred with the same (?) bolt of lightening by your comment that I have returned to it a few times before responding! I find myself nodding whole-bodied to your words. You've not only brilliantly clarified today's style of communication. You've fleshed it out exquisitely. What really grabbed me is the parallelism you make between today's conversation style and Tik-Toc experiences: "blips not meant to be dwelt on or chewed or digested," let alone the experiences of one another transmuted between us. My mind keeps drifting to images of whole families sitting at a restaurant table, no one looking at anyone but the phones in their palms, thumbs in perpetual motion, scrolling video blips, and the sadness that always washes through me when I see life lived lonely in parallel virtuality. It is heartening that small segments of a younger generation are abandoning the smartphone in favor of the flip phone, of reading or a picnic in a park without technology, of knitting, and so on: the next generation luddites. . . .
Toward the end of his life, Teilhard began to intimate that after the noosphere (the sphere of thought [and now AI] that emerged on Earth in the human long after the emergence of the biosphere), something akin to what Louis Savary has called a kardiasphere would form, calling forth the Heart into the world. The recognition that we have lost Heart is a recognition called forth and lived through the Heart itself. The Heart calls us to one another. And when we meet in this way, the kardiasphere has more substance to it. It becomes an evolutionary force in the world. If this helps, I say, take Heart, dear Friend. You and I are not irrelevant. We are laying the ground of Heart.
Thank you for this, Brenda. It is always a joy to hear from you, and thank you for sending that sister of yours over here beyond the comfort zone!