How is Your Heart?

Weekly wisdom to level up your creative life in 3 minutes, for free.

A SHORT STORY

One of my favorite Arabic phrases is the question - "Kayf halik?"

While this generally translates to “How are you?”, upon closer inspection, the word "hal" means the transient state or condition while on the way towards God.

In other words, “How is your heart at this very moment?”

After living in the Middle East off and on for many years, I have begun to adopt this question by inquiring with my friends - “How is your heart?”

The answers are wide and varied, allowing us to get to the core of ourselves.

I share this with all of you because I have been contemplating matters of the heart a lot as we head into the holidays.

And it reminds me of a story about the Buddha that I think about often.

When his closest disciple, Ananda, asked him what the greatest miracle was - walking on water or conjuring jewels out of thin air, he said, “Simply touching the heart of another human being. Acting kindly. That’s the greatest miracle of all.”

When I think of my legacy, this is how I want to be remembered - constantly being a container for healing conversations, ones filled with grace and presence.

How do you want to be remembered? And most importantly, how is your heart?

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A PIECE OF ART

“The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart” by Jack Gilbert

How astonishing it is that language can almost mean,
and frightening that it does not quite. Love, we say,
God, we say, Rome and Michiko, we write, and the words
get it wrong. We say bread and it means according
to which nation. French has no word for home,
and we have no word for strict pleasure. A people
in northern India is dying out because their ancient tongue
has no words for endearment. I dream of lost
vocabularies that might express some of what
we no longer can. Maybe the Etruscan texts would
finally explain why the couples on their tombs
are smiling. And maybe not. When the thousands
of mysterious Sumerian tablets were translated,
they seemed to be business records. But what if they
are poems or psalms? My joy is the same as twelve
Ethiopian goats standing silent in the morning light.
O Lord, thou art slabs of salt and ingots of copper,
as grand as ripe barley lithe under the wind’s labor.
Her breasts are six white oxen loaded with bolts
of long-fibered Egyptian cotton. My love is a hundred
pitchers of honey. Shiploads of thuya are what
my body wants to say to your body. Giraffes are this
desire in the dark. Perhaps the spiral Minoan script
is not a language but a map. What we feel most has
no name but amber, archers, cinnamon, horses and birds.

Grateful,

Michael