Cartography of the Heart

photo credit

You’d think that the map of one’s own heart would be well-traveled and as familiar as a favorite book, pages curled over, browned in some spots.  The mottling of the ink from dark coffee mixed with tears of both joy and despair spreading rampant across the parchment masking the events that caused their welling, their pouring, their eventual drying.  To look at one’s own heart is to see where one has been.  It cannot tell you where you are going.  

Obsidian obelisks remind of pain and waterfalls of tears cascade about them, but then there are the hills, the place where they said I’d find you.  They were right.  I found you on the hills, where foliage gives way to craggy rock and the air goes thin making my chest heave with the exertion and gasp for life-giving oxygen.  ‘Twas on the hills that we first met and my hand clasped to yours and I said I’d follow.  It wasn’t until the valleys though, that I began to know you.  

No, it wasn’t on the hills where my soul soared and I ran to dive off the side and wait for you to catch me.  No, it was in the valleys…in those dark places where the muck stank of dirt and rot, of the dead and hopeless that I began to know you.  It wasn’t until my chest cavity was carved out and with only a dull ache to remind me of what used to be that I finally understood just a little bit of what it means to be emptied.  So there, dizzied, wandering, not sure in which direction I should plant my next step, there did I turn to you.  Palms outstretched, plans marred, feet blistered with the desperation of my plans gone awry I offered to you all the bad I could see, all the good I didn’t know and asked you to point me, to lead me, to tell me where to go.

And so the compass rose leads.  This cartographer with His tools sketching out lines and landmarks; routes that I have yet to know their names with individuals I have yet to meet.  All I must do is follow.  One foot in front of the other. 

-Kristina @kjtanner

Redefining Awesome