Art is an expression of the heart.

Art is an expression of the heart. It is a way for the heart to speak. When the heart speaks it returns us to our original nature. We are brought back into alignment with our genuine self. The body cannot deceive. Only the mind can deceive. The mind can confuse itself. The body remains attuned to nature. The body is intrinsically part of nature. The heart of us always remains connected to what is holy. The sacred is deep within us. It wants to come out into the world. The heart wants to speak. The heart has a lot to say.

When one heart speaks, then all hearts are heard.

Yet the mind can interfere in this process. The mind often gets in the way of our original nature. We must restrain the mind and let the heart speak, unedited and uninterrupted. When the heart first speaks, it may lack eloquence and refinement, but with patience it will develop these skills. The blunt heart-speech may frighten us when first we heart it and we might be tempted to cover over the heart, to smooth out its words for it. Yet soon enough we may be speaking FOR the heart, putting words in its mouth, driving the heart back to silence. So we must be courageous when we hear the heart first speak. We must give it space to say what it wants to say. We must resist the urge to censor and edit the heart when it speaks.

If you never let your heart speak, then it can becomes more difficult as we age. We can get used to covering over our heart. Our original nature becomes more and more obscured.

There is something that I am trying to remember. I am trying my hardest, yet I can barely touch the edge of it with the softest movement of my hand. If I grasp it, it will be gone, and I will grope forever to find it again. But my heart doesn’t need to remember it, because it has never forgotten. It will never forget, it cannot forget. It has and will always remember.

I must listen to my heart, with its great memory, if I am ever to remember all that I have forgotten; yet not forgotten.

This brought a moment of silence to my mind. It was beautiful but frighteningly too personal.

But…

xanderman, what happens when art is the only way for one to express what the heart feels? How are you so sure that the heart, what ever that actually is, is connected to our original nature and the holy? I don’t understand any of this, but yet at the same time I have some overwhelming feeling, which I can’t describe, when I read this and have written my two previous poems. How do you let the heart speak to another? This seems like nonsense.

If reading this pointed you to a moment of stillness, then I consider it a resounding success.

“What happens when art is the only way for one to express what the heart feels?”

I cannot speak for everyone, but I do know that it can make me very lonely. To be a stanger in a stange land, to speak in a voice that few hear and ever fewer understand. To be met with the painfull blank stares. To have even those who earnestly want to understand look at you with eyes full of incomprehension.

“How are you so sure that the heart, what ever that actually is, is connected to our original nature and the holy?”

First he have to believe that anything is holy at all. Then we learn to see, “with eyes unclouded my hate.” Compassion is the gateway through which we overcome the finality of the ego. I am suffering and you are suffering. We are together in our suffering. We are not alone. We all suffer.

All of nature is perfect in a way that we, as mind, as personalities, as egos, have forgotten. The ego, the mind, or the personality is a secondary system of the body. It was created to help the body, not to master it.

One has to reject the Western mythology of nature as fallen. Nature is not something to be avoided, it is to be embraced.

The good is in the nature of the world, and it is also there in your own nature. That goodness is the core, or the heart of you. Yet that core is distainct from your personality. It preceeds the personality, it predates it. It is unconscious and irrational, or non-sense.

Letting the heart speak to another is hard, getting them to listen is even harder still. First we must learn to listen to our own hearts.