Inside of every one of us, there is a world, a world where it is always spring, a world that is a home for our inner sun. Do you remember this? Are you able to remember what it is to love fully and deeply?
This is what I hear when I think about the heart. And to think about the heart is to be welcomed to the secret garden I have inside of myself. To dive there is to be opened to the nature of remembering. Inside of this garden, where I’m able to meet my ancestors, because I am them and they are me, I feel the need to find the centre — not the place where everything comes from, because that’s not exactly what the centre is, but the place that is able to mediate every other place, the place where everything that is “me” has for its roots, the altar for the beings that occupy this garden, where they can meet and be in contact. This was my experience with the Re/membering our Rooted Selves course: an inner journey.
What, then, describes the core of this garden, the place where re-membering happens, the place where ancestors meet? What is the centre of a home?
If we look at our innermost garden the way we look at our homes, we could call its centre a hearth, a heating place to warm and light up the house, somewhere to keep the fire burning. But does this inner world of ours, our soul, have the need for fire? I would argue that it does. Fire is the element of light, change and heat. Fire is needed for that part of us we call life force. It is needed to fill us with hope and acceptance, with passion and purpose, because that’s what fire teaches: hope for whatever comes after any change, and acceptance that everything must undergo this movement; passion for the things that honour us, and purpose for our way of being in this world.
Heraclitus, the pre-socratic philosopher, said that the cosmos, the order of this universe, “always has been, is, and will be, an ever-living fire, kindling itself by regular measures and going out by regular measures” and that “there is an exchange of all things for fire and of fire for all things”. That fire is eternal, essential for any life, teaching the need for movement, for nourishment, for meaning, and for exchange of energies. Fire teaches us what it is to strive for something and to look outside of ourselves for guidance and love: any flame, when it burns, looks up to the skies, it is always reaching up, rising, passionately. Every flame has a clear direction. They know that to work how they need to, to fulfil their own purpose, they must look to growth and expansion. To burn, a flame must desire to reach and to look for its own place in the cosmos, its own calling, while being rooted to the place that gives it life, the earth.
But what, then, is the calling of fire? If fire is always reaching up, it becomes clear that the sky, the firmament, even if it isn’t the seat of these flames, concerns their existence, their being, by calling them to it. It is a space connected to the element, somewhere that can welcome the direction of its entelechy. And it makes sense to say that the entelechy of fire relates to that of our soul, because this part of our being needs its teachings to make that same path of the will and, even more, to connect the place that nourishes it to the place that it strives for: to connect both earth and ether in its existence.
By looking to the behaviour of fire, the soul learns to strive for its own purposeful movement, for its own process of becoming, of bringing these elements together.
And, if we consider its place in our bodies, we return to another type of centre: the heart. There have been many times where the heart has been posited as the seat of the soul. Examples of this can be seen in the role of the heart in the Ancient Egyptian religion or even in some of the words in Ancient Greek most close to today’s understanding of the soul: thymós (and its relation to feelings), kradíē (and its relation to the cardiac mind), psychḗ (and its relation to a life-substance akin to blood). Galen, an Ancient Greek physician, wrote about this organ: “The heart is, as it were, the hearthstone and source of the body’s innate heat and the organ most closely related to the soul”. The heart and its association to the soul, and to the emergence of consciousness, has existed for a long time.
In the fifth session of the Re/membering our Rooted Selves course, Andreza Jorge reminds us of this by quoting professor Théophile Obenga, who says that “thinking is a coronary exercise”, that it is something done through the heart. And if we look at this organ in this way, at that place where we cultivate our sensitivities through its capacity to generate a moral conscience, we may get to a whole different way of being. Thinking with our hearts may be what is needed for cultivating radical connection in today’s world.
By thinking with our hearts we connect to that part of our soul that has a place in the flames of the hearth, that part of us that desires an actualization of its purpose, expressing its will while staying rooted in its environment.
Now, you may be asking, what has this got to do with remembering and with the secret garden I alluded to at the beginning? I believe the heart and the element of fire have everything to do with remembering and interiority, because re-membering is the process of unity, it is a process of becoming that connects ‘members’ to restore a way of being. It is a way to return to a fundamental part of us that exists solely, or mostly, in unity. And this has everything to do with the heart because the heart, which is the centre of this secret garden, of our soul, is the place where that happens. In our heart(h), we are able to find the flames of being, the fire, the embers and the blaze, the ‘members’ of our being that are honoured by its work. In our heart(h) we find the middle point between earth and ether, where love is possible.
In an article for Atmos, Willow Defebaugh writes: “Love isn’t something we fall in or out of, but something we remember we are part of — much like we are part of nature”. Love is re-membering. Just as the flames flicker, so do the heart beats.
By thinking with our hearts, we open ways to new possibilities of being.
The heart is the organ that lets us tend to our own hearth, the core of our existence. It is the place where we tend to the most precious fire of all: being. This is the work of the centre: the tending of the flames of being, the honouring of all that is and of all that lives with us and within us, the cultivation of our ‘inner sun’ — a concept that was also mentioned in this course, by Aza Njeri, in the first session, while talking about the Bakongo philosophy —, the practice of love.
And, as P. Mary Viya Porselvi says, in the midpoint of the course, “in order to aspire, we need to be grounded. And no matter how high we go, it is from the roots that we draw sustenance”. Let us look, then, to our own heart(h)s to cultivate our connection to the Earth. Let us remember what it is to be connected, to be grounded, to be a being with a soul that roots itself into the ground where it is nourished. Let us honour the cosmos by tending to the flames of being, creating connection and providing love to the purposeful movement of existence. Let us bridge the earth and the ether.
