ID: 103017
Date Added: 2005-02-17
Date Modified: 2005-02-17
are our hearts breaking or growing...
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Pat Denino
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bitching...
Pat Denino is a fiber artist from Ohio who detests coloring inside the lines. Her journey of discovery is based on the reality that not only does the emperor not wear any clothes but, in fact, there was never an emperor in the first place!
are our hearts breaking or growing...
I’ve always been an explorer. Whenever the present moment wasn’t compelling I’d travel to the moon and look back at the earth. I’d sit there and watch the weather patterns and the earth’s rotation. The silence and distance seemed to quiet my mind. It was extremely difficult to find my house or my worries and troubles from that place, which is probably why I’d go there.
Other times I’d journey to the edge of the universe. I had understood that the universe was finite, and that space curved in on itself. So I envisioned a huge spherical something, which would have an edge, or boundary, and I’d travel there. It never made sense. I’d get to the edge of the universe and still be able to see past that edge. It seemed black out there, but if something was out there, even blackness, then I wasn’t really at the boundary, was I? It was a puzzle, for sure, and an intriguing one.
Then there were my wanderings within the universe, exploring the emptiness between the galaxies. At that time, my understanding was that nothing traveled faster than the speed of light. So, did that include prayer? It became rather important for me to know where God resided, then. What if I needed His help, and what if it took a long time for prayers to reach Him? What if I really was on my own and nobody knew I existed? Would I then exist?
Traveling through time was another cool thing I knew how to do. I’d travel to the Big Bang, or depending on your interpretation, the beginning of creation. That was always confusing, though, to my unschooled mind. I could always see something beyond the edge, before the beginning. What was it? Where did the stuff come from? Could there have been another Big Bang before the Big Bang?
I’d travel forward in time to the day of my death and beyond to the day I finally made it into heaven. Now what? Goodness for all eternity? Doing what? After the obligatory praise and adoration, I would finally have time to master the French horn, learn to do back flips, and travel to all the planets and invent new colors…and then what? I’d reconnect with my friends and family members who’d gone on before, but for eternity? I could imagine a week, maybe, to catch up on things, but yikes! Not for all eternity!
I’ve even traveled to that moment of the creation of “me”. Not the me that is a sixty year old body, but the me that lives in that body. My soul? When did it begin? It will live for all eternity, but it has a discrete beginning? Hmmmm. That was back in the days when my shortcomings were painfully obvious to me. Coldheartedness, for example. I just could never figure it out. Did all the unfinished souls line up like in an assembly line? And when hearts were inserted, maybe they missed me? Was I doomed for all eternity because my soul wasn’t paying attention at the right moment?
Size shifting was something else I could do in my travels. Do you remember the movie “The Incredible Shrinking Man?” The end of that movie was the beginning of another adventure. What will things look like when I’m the size of a molecule? A proton? What happens when I keep shrinking and the proton becomes the size of the earth and I can stand on it? Can I look out and see another universe, an infinitesimally small universe, which looks just like the universe I see out my window at night? Will I still be “me” when I’m that small? Will I be made of even smaller molecules?
One of my more memorable journeys took me inside a mountain. For a time, I was able to be that mountain and share its soul. Time took on a different meaning. I can’t say time stood still, because I was aware of everything that happened as it was happening. I felt the movement of tree roots groping downward, searching for water, the tickle of hikers and skiers on my skin; I heard the cyclic sounds of the birth, life, and death of bears, hawks, field mice, earthworms, dragonflies, centipedes. I felt the deeper earth beneath me, slowly moving, slowly changing my own shape.
Lately my travels have been more local – confined to this planet. I have no right to invade other peoples’ privacy and explore inside their own souls, but there are times I hear someone crying. I know when I’ve cried in silence, my deep yearning was for someone to hear my pain. It was as though the cry was a tendril of smoke. If only someone would find it and follow it to the source – me. Armed with that awareness, I’ve been hearing a lot of cries, lately.
I don’t wonder about my heart anymore. Somewhere along the way it got figured out. The thing about my heart is, it seems to have ears. I hear cries I’ve never heard before. Some are the cries of the orphaned children in Iraq. Some of the cries are the soldiers who were required to take actions that caused the orphaning. I hear cries closer to home, too: the poor, the children who’ve been abandoned by parents who’ve been abandoned by society itself, the coral reefs that are beginning to die, the polar bears that may be facing extinction. Sometimes I think I hear the cry of the Earth itself.
It seems I have a lot of traveling to do as my heart hears more and more silent cries. I think that’s why my heart is healthy now, by the way. It’s getting some exercise! Perhaps I don’t really understand everything about my heart yet, though. Something whispers in my mind that it’s not just mine; that maybe there’s one all encompassing Heart that we all share.
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