The healing heart

What does the heart weave together when it flows? An indispensable organ, little known except from the specialists allowed to fix it, we only think of this discreet equalizer when it changes rhythm. But when it does, it wreaks havoc.

For the longest time in my life, I didn’t give it any thought. My heart was working fine, thank you, and that was all that was expected from it. But then one day, during a routine examination by my general practitioner, it turned out that the little red thing was beating much too fast. A few weeks later, I laid in a hospital room where I was being prepared for a surgical operation that was to be performed by a “rythmologist”. At first, I thought a beatmaker was about to take care of bringing my rhythms back into harmony, which I found pretty cool. But it soon turned out “rythmologist” was a sophisticated expression meant to describe a certain kind of heart surgeon, which was somewhat cool as well, although in a different way. I had plenty of time to think about these questions while my body was being connected by colored wires to a device analyzing my heart rhythm and its deviations.

In an empty room where the human voice bounces back on the bare walls with an eerie sound, the bored patient calls loved ones, receives expressions of affection, authorized visits. All these connections form a web of supportive, warm ties, whose gentleness is much appreciated. The whole experience was indeed reassuring, even touching, but it did not quench my thirst for knowledge and understanding.

What is it that flows through the heart? What is it made of? Just biological pipes, or something else? Is there some kind of truth in the old metaphors that make it the center of our emotions and relationships, a perspective revisited by Jon Freeman in his book “the Science of possibility”? How far does the network that irrigates and regenerates us minute after minute extend? Does it reach beyond the physical boundaries of our body? What kind of “information” is being routed in this hub, in the same way as our bloodstream carries oxygen to our vital organs? And if something else, something more than just oxygen is being exchanged there, how does that affect our sense of a separate identity? Jon Freeman’s book ambitions to reconnect abstract science with a poetical, intuitive perception of the world, offering “some simplicity (that) will emerge on the far side of the complexity”. In rationalism-obsessed France, only artists and poets are allowed to venture into the “consciousness” territory. My surgeon would probably have laughed at me if I had tried to question her on these topics. But people in other cultures are often more open to new ways of seeing.

During the summer, a succession of encounters and events allowed me to bring to these questions evolving answers, in turn abandoned, taken up again and reconfigured, while the war at our doors, the drought and the fires transformed the vacation period into an ordeal indefinitely prolonged for all.

I had to learn to heal in a country that was burning, from the Landes to the Monts d’Arrée, passing through the forest of Brocéliande.

The flames were not only consuming trees: they were attacking the very roots of our imagination, the landscapes that have always nurtured our sense of identity, and all the living beings that inhabit these ecosystems: birds, small mammals, insects, batrachians. All those who had not been able to flee, delivered to an atrocious death.

By its exceptional duration, the disaster had broken the regenerative cycles from which, every year, we regain our strength after a working year that puts our body and mind to a severe test. Just as the body fills up with vitamin D when it is exposed to the sun, we need to activate our physical sensations, sight, touch, smell, taste, to rebuild our health capital. But the landscapes, skies, mountain runs or sea swims, tasty fruits, scents of scrubland or undergrowth, everything that we usually absorb with delight was this year veiled, corrupted, tinged with an acrid aftertaste of smoke.

The carefree summer, usually marked by rest or activities favorable to the reunion with one’s loved ones, with one’s own vitality and what we call with a vague word “nature”, was no longer allowed. It is difficult to write and publish under these conditions, at the risk of weakening the morale of our readers even more, so I postponed the moment to finish this article.

It was at the very end of the season that a more satisfying answer came to me, when I read a text by Yongey Mingur Rinpoche published by Mathieu Ricard. In it, he talked about the meditation of altruistic love and compassion, in which we expand our empathy from close friends and family members to complete strangers, even to those who have harmed us or to whom we have harmed, to include all living things. “When I started practicing compassion meditation, my sense of isolation began to diminish (…) I began to see the well-being of others as the very foundation of my inner peace,” explains the Buddhist monk.

As I read these lines, I myself began to feel the inner peace mentioned, radiating from the center of my body from where oxygen was diffused to each of my cells, bringing life to them. Trained to practice cardiac coherence, I felt a beautiful alignment between my thoughts, my emotions and my physical sensations. A deep joy united me with all beings, from all kingdoms: humans, chattering birds, succulents and geraniums hanging in the window box, neighbors, inhabitants of the neighborhood, and even all Parisians, in concentric circles, then beyond, in all of France and always further away.

Suddenly, nothing seemed impossible. The usual limits that one no longer thinks of questioning had dissolved. Without having taken drugs, and without sharing their convictions, I understood, better I felt the faith that animates the great revolutionaries, in the form of a powerful vital impulse.

So, this was healing? To heal indeed, for good? But what about the shadows? What was one supposed to do with the shadows?

At the risk of shocking some people, let’s recognize that many of those who are interested in personal development do so in a self-centered way. They seek their own well-being at the cost of indifference to the well-being of others, who are seen as losers unable to reach a higher level of consciousness. This attitude is embarrassing, but it is widespread. First shadow: can one really imagine healing alone, without others? And for oneself alone?

The second revelation came from a Finnish artist, in residence at the Château de Trévarez, in the western tip of Brittany.

“What is it that flows through the heart?” asked Raija Jokinen, “whose work focuses on the biological and spiritual links between human beings and nature,” according to her Wikipedia entry.

The answer she gives is so clear: the heart, says all her work, is at the center of a bundle of relationships, and these relationships are the currents that carry life.

The heart is at the center of relational life. At the center of life itself. Not only emotionally, but physically, and in the circulation of information. This is what Jon Freeman explains in “the Science of possibility”. He describes the exchange of information — and not only of oxygen — that occurs between the heart and the brain, and with all the cells of our body through the bloodstream or the nervous system. By reading it, we better understand why cardiac coherence exercises or altruistic meditation open us to the sensation of a profound unity of the living, in all its modalities: cognitive, emotional or physical.

We also better understand our individual responsibility in this process. At any moment, we are given the choice to participate in the catastrophe or to commit ourselves to the path of regenerative healing.

The work of Raija Jokinen concretely translates this vision, which she makes accessible to all visitors to her exhibition. In the ruins of the castle bombed during the Second World War and then abandoned for decades, the textile artist installs human figures woven in a linen fiber mixed with rice starch, an organic material that lets light pass through.

Drawings ? Sculptures ? Raija Jokinen defines her art as hybrid. It is, in every sense of the word. Because if for her, the human being is not out of the ground, and is part of the animal kingdom just as it is connected to the vegetable kingdom, it is not either out of time. From these figures flow colored laces evoking blood networks connected to their environment but also, through time, to those who lived there, before the wars. And more widely still, the relationship extends to all the living beings, animals, plants, which populate the park with their presence.

Raija Jokinen, installation, château de Trévarez

You can see a video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mlMNyC1r-7M

You can also watch an interview with the artist here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IR4Dpgh9zUY

The exhibition continues outside.

Facing the castle, at the edge of the park, stands a sculpture made of red fibers drawing in space two gigantic quivering lungs. They seem to draw from the air itself an oxygen that they alchemize and transmit to the whole site via their root system. Blood and sap. Circulation. We can see in this an equivalent of photosynthesis, a process by which plants capture photons that they transform into nutrients — that is to say, into life.

The Finnish artist thus gives us to see what usually remains invisible: the interconnection of all beings. And how can we not think of the coral, associating in a wonderful symbiosis a plant and an animal? The bright red color of the sculpture, contrasting with the soft green of the park, establishes a visual continuity between the spaces, and we better understand the artist’s intention: to repair the broken links, the tears of neglect and time, without erasing the ravages of war but integrating them into the process of life.

Thus healing occurs. With the shadows integrated, connected, free to melt back into the landscape that is reconfigured here. For the restorers of the castle have not erased the traces of the bombing of August 44, nor the dubious relations of the former owners.

These relationships between the different kingdoms of life already fascinated Goethe, a great observer of nature, and today Jon Freeman, Baptiste Morizot or Estelle Zhong Mengual (environmental art historian), emblematic authors of deep ecology. They teach us to see, to perceive, and sometimes just to guess the vibrant background on which our existences unfold. What do we see when we no longer place the human being at the center of the universe? What does a valley, a forest, look like from the point of view of a wolf? What do we see, when intelligence is incarnated in an organ? Opportunities to deploy its vitality. (Baptiste Morizot, Manières d’être vivant). For these authors, information and emotion are two modalities of reality. The heart is no longer a HQ, a cockpit, but a crossroads where information is distributed between actors considered equivalent in legitimacy. It is another form of intelligence: the intelligence of the heart, which is deployed there.

But if other living beings are just as legitimate as we are, if we finally recognize them as our equals, how can we escape guilt when we see all that we put them through? Forests that burn, poisoned soils, habitats that are shrinking under the steamroller of land artificialization. Our shadows stretch endlessly across devastated landscapes. When we come out of denial, when we face the consequences of our choices, eco-anxiety arises. Empathy comes back to hit us like an emotional boomerang. Our expanded consciousness can no longer ignore what is dying in the corners, but we can’t stand it. Many opt for denial, others for bargaining (I still drive my SUV but I don’t eat meat during the week), still others fall into depression, or channel their anger into exhausting activism. All the stages of the grief curve go through them, before arriving at acceptance.

And many get sick.

A few weeks after the operation, I learned from a close friend that she had to be hospitalized in emergency for a heart problem. The impulse that carried me towards her to bring her listening and comfort resonated with the support received at the beginning of the summer, in the spring when my father died, as well as in other more distant circumstances. A circularity of care, of attention given or received, takes shape, and the figures of the Finnish artist linked together by nets of a beautiful coral red come back to my memory. Empathy is then revealed as the very essence, suddenly made visible, of the networks woven between characters, places and beings. What science does not know how to measure, whose existence it sometimes denies, and yet which is the fabric of life, artists know how to give it form and visibility.

Will we be able to weave equivalent relations with the other forms of the living? When we come back from a walk in the forest, invigorated, soothed and nourished, what will we do to protect them and their inhabitants? How can we express our gratitude to them in concrete terms?

Back to the hospital. The second heart operation went well. The perfusion and the red, yellow, green and black wires of the telemetry that linked me to the scope like Raija Jokinen’s figures to their environment and to the ghosts of the castle of Trévarez were removed.

The hospital is not like a castle, but one does form ephemeral bonds with a room-mate, with nurses, with a surgeon, and one maintains other relationships, at a distance, all connected in the heart.

My roommate is gone. Through the window, finally free of the screen that obstructed it, I can see the orange brick walls of Léopold Bellan, where my mother was treated.

I feel energized, determined never to waste a day, according to David Bowie’s beautiful slogan. In twenty-four hours, I will be able to go home, and in a few days fly to the Philippines, where I look forward to seeing wonderful people, warm blue seas, and hopefully, living forests and coral reefs.

And we can continue to heal, together.