Letting the heart rest...wholeheartedness continued

"Most of the things we need to be most fully alive, never come in busyness. They grow in rest."

Mark Buchanan, author of The Holy Wild...

View From the Hill

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With all the talk of living from the heart, we sometimes forget that occasionally we need to "rest" our hearts in order to live more wholeheartedly over the long run. Just as the body needs physical rest, so, too, the heart needs emotional and spiritual rest and renewal. Certain meditation practices can help us to do this - breathing "into" the heart, visualizing the heart as resting in a special room in our "interior mansion," using bio-feed back to slow the heart rate, listening to a guided meditation on heart awakening or opening the heart chakra. For those inclined to prayer, repetitive prayers and mantras can bring the heart ease and still the mind that keeps the heart from its rest. St. Augustine apparently knew this practice as he once said, speaking of God, "Our hearts are restless until they rest in you." 

Being a country gal, often my analogies are taken from the cycles of planting and harvesting that I witness repeating year after year and it occurred to me that our hearts are much like the fields we rely on to provide our sustenance. Hearts, too, should lie fallow occasionally. 

Fallow Heart

The heart, like an overworked farmer’s field,

sometimes must lie fallow for a while,

needing some seasons of replenishment

lest we deplete its rich topsoil of love.

Plow under the compost of last year’s crop,

let the toxin of losses leach away so that

it can do no more harm to body or soul.

The heart is not a thing to be forced

to keep producing what it does not have;

no phony artificial additives result

in a harvest rich with nutrients of giving.

No pretenses can cover the destructive truth

of the constant erosion of our spirits

caused by the greedy agribusiness of takers

who reap the heart’s profits without due care.

In the season when our heart-fields lay fallow

we learn what nourishing renewal requires -

let the birds of hope return like welcome guests

to drop the clover seeds of restful waiting,

let the boundaries of respect and self-care

contain the precious topsoil of our loving self.

Let our wildflowers of self-creative growth

attract the butterflies to play upon our petals

with nothing further asked of us than just to be.

And let the majestic oaks that line our borders

shade us from the fiery heat of thoughtless passion,

be receptors for the rainfall of personal reflection

that will renew, restore and replenish our hearts

so they might bounteously give from love again. 

© Lianne Schneider March 2010

Next post on Friday - what to learn from heartbreak...

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