Heart Reading … Day 25

What to do when your heart behaves like a ping pong ball.

Ping pong balls have great qualities, heart-like qualities such as lightness and rhythm, at least when well played! But they can also scatter inconsistently without a steady hand. I like to think of my hands as steady, and they generally don’t shake too badly, but if I am struggling (as I am today) to keep my hand on my heart due to impulsivity and impatience, then this non-steady hand playing ping pong poorly metaphor is an apt description for how my heart is at the moment.

With all my white privilege affording me a roof over my head and a pillow under it, along with less obvious stress than I have ever had in my multiple decades on this earth, along with a careful and healthy diet and moderate exercise, if my heart can be so agitated, what about the hearts of our fellow humans facing the threat of bombs, houselessness, food insecurity, sexual assault, and climate horrors? Today is one of those days where I really don’t want to write about my heart. It is fed up with injustice and sick to death of the insanity in the world — largely at the hands of white Americans like me.

Okay I can’t even let that go. Yes, I am white and American and white Americans are the power and climate problem in aggregate — sheepish, comfortably complicit aggregate. But I am an intensely compassionate woman, hyper sensitive to the psycho-graffic profiling done by the mill-i-tarry industreeal complex; so much so that I cannot consume any media without seeing the pay-tree-archal influences — both benign and malignant — that produced it.

Herein lies the ping pong of my heart. Mad as hell at war mongering forces “beyond my control” yet grateful and satisfied for having carefully manifested the conditions for peace and wellness. The more peace I experience, the more capacity I have for “leaning in” to take action. The sense that it’s not for me to know or decide whether or not I am contributing enough to solutions and not contributing too much to problems (this is for the higher powers guiding my life to know and decide), is what can steady my hand on my heart.

I read a few expert opinions on the chronic state of autoimmune overdrive people are experiencing, including children today. It is heart breaking to contemplate the levels of stress humanity is enduring right now. Some people tell me, “so stop contemplating so much.” But I believe that my thoughts of compassion are prayers and I believe these prayers matter.

I may never be able to play ping pong better than barely adequate, but I can keep my hand steady on my heart and breathe deeply — energetically sending wishes for my sister and brother humans to be safe, sheltered, nourished, and hopeful.

Yesterday, Day 24, I wrote about the polarity of pain and clarity, sadness and hope. With so much pain and sadness in the world, I have to believe that hope and clarity is emerging, wherever and however it shall be, in equal measure.