H is for Heart

Yeah, okay, back to the pagan blog project. I'll see if I can do a bit of catching up. Unfortunately, the post I had drafted at one point seems to have vanished from my hard drive, so I'll have to do some rebuilding....

Both of my primary religions have symbolism that orbits around the heart. When I talk about this, I am talking about one or the other or both without differentiating, so you get to sort it out if you wanna.

Heart as true nature, heart as moral centre, heart as direct connection with divinity. These all exist: to be in accord with one's heart is to be in accord with divine will, to be doing what is right in the world, to operate from a place of truth and simplicity.

This is a goal. It is not a place that we actually live, except in moments of perfect alignment, perfect purity; it is a place to strive towards, and to experience like we experience creative flow. Perhaps we can't live there all the time, like creative flow - maybe we need the other times to achieve something meaningful. I don't know.

But there is this deep, primal need in most people, to hear the truth of the heart. That still small voice of the conscience, perhaps, or the thing that drives connection, right action, right being, right living. It doesn't matter what the trappings are on that; there is "I did not put in their hearts to do evil" in an old Egyptian texts, after all.

It is worth being careful, though. It is too easy to bury the still small voice, the soft murmurings of the heart, under other things, and claim that those are the voice of the heart. Fear is one; hunger, another, things that reside in the pit of the stomach, up against the places where we assimilate our power. We want, and we want what we want to be pure; we fear, and we want what we fear to be impure.

The heart doesn't always back us up on that kind of thing. H is also for hubris, I suppose.