Heart Reading … Day 12

Glad to be here, in this moment, awake, alive, and able to write.

Today I told a coworker about this daily practice and it almost sabotaged the whole thing for me energetically (it feels like my personal secret). Anyway, it wasn’t an easy day for either of us and she was telling me about experiencing the smoke on the U.S. East Coast that had traveled from the West Coast. Instinctively I offered up to our conversation this daily practice — more knee-jerk than intentional — as the one thing that seems to be keeping me sane … Perhaps everyone is so subconsciously aware of the madness driving humanity to the brink of extinction that it’s all we can do to string together a few precious moments of conscious clarity each day amid the insanity of emotional, logistical, physical, spiritual, and every other multifaceted layer of stress woven into our present existence.

I tend to be so succinct, so economical, with my words (at least conversationally) and at the moment I don’t like it. Brevity echoes the sensation of doom — the inculcated notion in American society that we are all on the clock. And unlike the grand promise of the 1980s culture crafters, Americans most certainly don’t have oodles of leisure time, even the white people this bill of goods was prepared for and sold to.

I woke this morning thinking about suicide. Not that I am in the least suicidal just that beautiful souls (like Abbie Hoffman whom I wrote about on Day 11) who come to the very alive, creative, somatic embodiment of love in action — a dance concert with the spirit of creation, of all that is — sometimes take their own lives even if accidentally (like Prince Rogers Nelson whom I was thinking about in the wee hours of sleeplessness today). From Wikipedia I learned that George Eastman, a pioneer in photography and motion picture, shot himself in the heart.

Today’s heart reading has me feeling that regret is what weighs our hearts down — missed expressions of Truth along every spectrum of interpersonal communication. I pray for my heart to feel the ever-present gentle peace carried by the breath, re-spiring as it does — even on video calls — with others in my life day to-day. It is the path to freedom.

This notion I have of kind and gracious interpersonal communication without regret between all living beings feels like the new world order so many visionaries have fought for. I don’t have much fight in me at the moment, but I am still breathing, fire smoke and all, imagining the world in which:

• all guns go away, along with America’s love affair with them
• everyone hears the truth about inequity, poverty, and the injustice perpetuated around access to food, water, housing, education, and employment
• we all eschew extravagance