Spirit Matters: Heart a guiding symbol on the path of life

My mom always picks out a birthday card that seems like it was made just for me.

Her card arrived Thursday, and Friday morning as I was eating my oatmeal, the image on the front of the card grabbed my attention again.

A whimsical tree full of hearts.

The colorful hearts are positioned every which way on the branches, some hang in midair, and others float upward into the ethers.

I have always been magnetically drawn to the heart symbol. When I was a child, I asked my mom to make a pillow in the shape of a heart for me, which she did, in a multi-colored fabric. And, in my obsession with doodling, hearts often appear randomly all over the page, without my even being conscious of it.

The image on my birthday card reminds me of another whimsical heart-covered tree I encountered while I was at work one day in my young adulthood. I returned to that image over and over again. There was something about that tree full of hearts that spoke to my soul that words just couldn’t reach.

The Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung wrote about archetypes, dreams and symbols. According to him, our unique, never-to-be-repeated soul speaks a mysterious language that can (at least partially) be understood through the signs and symbols that speak to us.

I don’t believe my life-long interest in the heart symbol, and the way it randomly, yet consistently, shows up in my life is a fluke.

There is something about what that shape represents, and my understanding of what it means that is encoded in my soul.

Throughout my entire life, I have longed to live a heart-centric existence. By heart-centric, I mean genuine, without putting on false airs. It means being compassionate, gentle, understanding, forgiving, and so on. I try to infuse my work with a heart-centric approach, and when I do, it has a way of connecting to readers that is beyond my ability to concoct.

But to me, living a heart-centric life means even more than all of this.

It means living from my heart space, yes. But from what or where does my heart space come? For that matter, from what or where does your heart space come?

I can desire to live a heart-centric life, but if I don’t understand that those beautiful qualities of compassion, gentleness, kindness, etc. are only possible through being connected to the Heart of all Existence, then my efforts will be in vain.

Through daily prayer and meditation, I am learning just how expansive our heart space can be, and its capacity to hold a multitude of memories, experiences, dreams and people in it at once.

If the human heart space has such a capacity, what of the Sacred Heart from which our hearts were born?

I look once more at the birthday card Mom sent me this week, and see the multi-colored hearts in various sizes and positions on the branches of the tree.

All of them unique and with their own direction, but emerging from one tree, the roots of which feed off the nutrients of the soil in which it is grounded.

Like that tree filled with hearts, my life and the heart work I have done so far has been nurtured from the Sacred Heart of Being, and if it has connected with others, it is because of that life-giving flow of divine nutrients.

As I begin my next year rotating around the sun today, I expect the force that drives my longing to live a heart-centric life will only intensify.

It is what my soul was designed for, after all.

SPIRIT MATTERS is a weekly column by Jerrilyn Zavada Novak that examines experiences common to the human spirit. Contact her at jzblue33@yahoo.com.