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...

View from the Hill

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Care for the earth - the virtue of "husbanding"

"We won't have a society if we destroy the environment."

Margaret Mead

 River Reflections

http://fineartamerica.com/featured/river-reflections-lianne-schneider.html

The ninth heroic virtue Sam Keen lists in his discussion of the qualities of the men and women who undertake and complete the sacred quest to know and love oneself and journey beyond self into a life inspired by virtue, passion, compassion, service, wonder and care for all is an old-fashioned word seldom used today – husbanding.  

 

One of my favorite writer/poets, Wendell Berry, lives on a farm in Kentucky and he explained in some detail what the term means – and far better than I could ever do. “To husband is to use with care, to keep, to save, to make last, to conserve. Old usage tells us that there is a husbandry also of the land, of the soil, of the domestic plants and animals - obviously because of the importance of these things to the household. And there have been times, one of which is now, when some people have tried to practice a proper human husbandry of the non-domestic creatures in recognition of the dependence of our households and domestic life upon the wild world. Husbandry is the name of all practices that sustain life by connecting us conservingly to our places and our world; it is the art of keeping tied all the strands in the living network that sustains us.” -  Wendell Berry, Bringing it to the Table: Writings on Farming and Food

Today, the reason this is a heroic virtue should be self-explanatory – every day we are bombarded by stories of how our foods have been adulterated, our water contaminated, our air quality destroyed, our rainforests disappearing, our oceans polluted…and so it goes, day after day. Conservation has been a watchword for decades and environmental protection had at one time achieved the status of a federal cabinet office. In recent years, however, the art and virtue of husbanding has been the subject of debate or downright mockery. We know in our hearts that we must stop the destruction before we ourselves are destroyed - and the real enemy here is greed.

I am not going to proselytize further - there is no one out there who is unaware of what is happening even if they pretend not to or are benefiting from the raping and pillaging of the earth. But I would say to artists, writers, musicians, sculptors and the like that this is one virtue that should come easily to all of us. Our life's work is about beauty or the loss of that, love or the lack of love - how better could we express it than through the arts which can touch people's souls and remind them of what must be protected if we are to survive. We can make a difference.

 

We won't have a society if we destroy the environment.
Read more at http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/m/margaretme157496.html#cX8fW3JWmiEYrErq.99

We won't have a society if we destroy the environment.
Read more at http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/m/margaretme157496.html#cX8fW3JWmiEYrErq.99

We won't have a society if we destroy the environment.
Read more at http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/m/margaretme157496.html#cX8fW3JWmiEYrErq.99

We won't have a society if we destroy the environment.
Read more at http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/m/margaretme157496.html#cX8fW3JWmiEYrErq.99