The Heart of the Thing

My friends and I have started a Medium publication. Here’s what it’s about.

When I was a kid, I used to go out in the front yard and dig up anthills.

Our yard was about six acres of flat West Texas scrub, and the anthills were in the centers of wide circles of bare dirt that the ants had cleared. They were red harvester ants, which we called fire ants because when one of them bit you you’d have a welt that burned for three days.

I wore my dad’s leather gloves when I went to dig them up. I took a big garden spade and had on thick jeans and long sleeves and boots. I’d stomp out to the front yard and plunge my spade into the hard circle of bare dirt.

I was looking for the ant queen.

My shovel and my gloved hands would reach down into the dirt swarming with angry red ants, and they’d climb up biting at my gloves and sleeves, and I’d dig deeper until I found her, white and fat, deep in the earth. I’d pull her out and look at her, pale paralyzed royalty torn from her bedchamber for the first time, the root and heart of the hive, wriggling in my hand in the Texas sun.

I always let her go, after. I’d just wanted to see her for myself.

I don’t think I’m the only one who feels this compulsion to dig for the hearts of things. Not everybody digs up anthills, but everybody with any curiosity has tried to reach in and down and bring out something secret.

We look for personal connections with pieces of art, with novels and songs. We grow closer to a certain person, and we want to get past the acting and see the naked self they keep hidden from the world. We push ourselves to climb steep mountain trails and lift things heavier than we’ve ever lifted, to find out where our bodies quit, and to see if we can push them even further.

In all these different ways, we’re searching for a place where ordinary context falls away, and we come face to face with an experience that can’t be described in terms of anything else—something holy.

As loaded as that word is — and oh man, is it ever a loaded word — it’s a word that fits.

Those are the moments I like to write about. They’re what some of my friends like to write about, too. So I started a Medium publication to gather the best of my friends’ writing and promote the hell out of it, because it’s good writing that deserves to be seen more widely. Click on the logo to take a look:

You can also follow us on Twitter: @HeartOfTheThing

The writing there is good, as you’ll see, and more good writing is coming.