Living from the Heart

Friday, February 15 ~ Albuquerque, New Mexico

I'm still in bed when the phone rings. It's my daughter's mother, calling to say that winter storms in Northern Arizona have rendered the roads so snow- and ice-bound that the drive through Flagstaff, AZ to Gallup, NM is too dangerous to make.

Normally, when my eight-year-old daughter comes to visit me from Sedona, AZ, we all meet in Gallup. That was to have been today's plan, with Guinevere spending the President's Day holiday weekend with me.

I hang up the phone and begin to cry and then cry even more because I'm so surprised to find myself crying.

Sure, I'm disappointed. But that disappointed? After all, I just saw Guinevere five weeks ago and will see her in Sedona in two weeks.

And yet the tears continue to flow.

So often as we move through our days and weeks, doing what we do and being what we be, we're unaware of the sea of emotions that ebbs and flows far beneath the hard surface of life's routine.

It's easy for our major triumphs and tragedies to pierce that surface. We expect tears of joy and sadness when something life-changing occurs.

Yet as we open more fully to our emotional subtleties and as we surrender more completely to feelings we have hidden, even from ourselves, it takes much less to trigger those tears.

It's a cliche to say that it's important to "get in touch with our feelings."

We do it, though, not by dropping a probe into that sea of emotions and poking about. We do it through a moment-to-moment practice of opening our hearts more and more fully -- not to anyone or anything in particular, but to everyone and everything in general. We do it through a moment-to-moment practice of surrendering to the call of our heart, by answering that call, by living that call.

Living from the heart means being open to all that the heart would reveal to us -- and to all the ways we have hidden from it.

Living from the heart means that both the sea of emotions and the tears that flow from it are closer to the surface than at any time since childhood (when our defenses were not so impenetrable).

Living from the heart means surrendering to those emotions -- and to those tears -- as we allow all that we feel to move through us.

As I dry my eyes and begin to move through my day, I'm grateful for the phone call, grateful even for the disappointment, grateful for the deeper opening to my daughter...and to my heart.