Letter to My Heart

Often our extended family will vacation together: my own husband and kids, plus my parents, and sometimes my brother and his family.  But this summer, my parents went somewhere just the two of them. While they were gone, my brother and I worried about them.  What will they do?  Won't they get bored without their noisy brood of grandchildren to keep things interesting?  I felt so sorry for them. 

Big Heart!!! Stop this bickering and shut up already. Get back to doing what you do best -- pumping blood to Big Brain sitting up there in the head so she can make the right moves and I can go back to being a lean, mean thinking machine. Seriously, is this faceoff, this tug and pull, necessary? You guys think it is easy for me to sort out the mess you make in my gut, or wherever? Can't you agree sometime? (BB is just as guilty, but I am supposed to write to you, so).

Dear Heart, I am so glad I finally learned how to listen to what you were saying and realized what you had to say was at least as important if not much more so than listening to my head. After childhood our relationship was pretty on again/off again. What with having to find my way in the world and choices about career and relationships the journey was filled with nothing but conflict. You were speaking loud and clear in those days but I didn't know how to listen. I didn't know the secret to a life well lived has far more to do with following my heart than the prescripts for success handed to me by other well-meaning people.

What are our hearts for, really? For Conversemomma of Ordinary Art, her heart is a street musician who conga-lines alongside her, pounding out theme music for her story. The percussion is killer. Her post, Letter to My Beating Heart sounds out stark, personal stories of heartaches good, bad and worse. Who among us doesn't have a few of these flinch-worthy memories? Their true grit makes Conversemomma's lyrical writing all the more rewarding:

Dear Heart – You really are all over the place. You had an innocent murmur at birth, which more or less means you made an extra sound, a breather between beats. And now you’re oddly palpitating such that I can feel you in my chest, which I really wish you’d stop.