Two Hearts

The physical heart is everybody's guess and no one is wrong. But that other heart, the one we know only through rumors carried by urgent winds or messages coded in birdsong or by the report of angels. So ancient is that other heart, we can only know it by indirection. Its deep mystery can only be grasped by those penetrated by love. It is a story whose ending is rewritten by such lovers. It is spirit-stuff and vanishes when it is situated among human beings whose confused responses justify the hidden place to which the physical heart tries to confine it. This is our second heart which understands every language on earth but chooses to only speak through feelings. Oh, you lovers, don't you sense only one heart beating in double time, blending the material and the spiritual in a union so perfect, so transparent we can hardly see it in the glare of ordinary light. Say then, there is one heart whose two halves long to be whole. Of the spiritual half, you lovers can give us further knowledge of its practice. We hunger for this knowledge: it is the truth of our being, the source of our goodness, what makes us beautiful. We agree to be faithful to its austere discipline. We bow before its glory! Whatever you have learned from your immersion in the forms of love, spill it, scatter it in our midst, let it become a flood that carries us to a higher plateau or being or drowns us in this muddy lowland. We must grasp the truth you lovers know, the truth by which we live or die: Only those who love unconditionally, only those who know the true path is illuminated by love, only those who have sworn to live every moment in love given and love received, only those will be redeemed. Look backward to the beginning of humanity, look forward to its end, witness its fused heart.