Heart First, Head Second
“Write with your heart first; with your head second.”
So advises irascible and reclusive novelist William Forrester to Jamal Wallace, his young and extraordinarily gifted scholar-athlete in the 2000 film “Finding Forrester” as they sit in Forrester’s dark and aging Bronx apartment. Like Forrester himself, the neighborhood has changed over the years, and not for the better. Jamal, knowing he has an extraordinary gift and is different from everyone around him, seeks his life’s purpose in places no sixteen-year-old in his world would even dare consider, let alone enter.
Heart first. Head later.
As a writer, I understand this, but I can’t say I always practice it. It is a lonely endeavor, writing, one that any scribe will tell you he prefers to do in loneliness and solitude and may only be able to do in quietude and isolation, because no one else understands what it is to be under the spell of such an insistent and seductive muse. A muse who has been known to cause men to abandon their families, ruin their lives with drugs and alcohol, and even to end their lives. Yet, write they must. They cannot stop themselves. Addiction it is, a cure for which no writer under its influence will voluntarily seek.
But what of living? Should I live by following my heart first, only to think through my decisions later when it may be too late to change what I’ve done, or what I’ve said? When the wave has broken, how do you roll it back into the sea?
I have a spirit guide. Her name is Trikola. I first heard from her back in the mid-80s when I was living in El Paso, Texas, a kind of urban oasis on the outer fringe of the state that is closer to Los Angeles than it is to Houston. It seldom rains in that part of the country, so almost every night I would find myself outside, staring up at the Milky Way, specifically at a cluster of stars that has felt familiar to me since I was a kid. Familiar because it is my star home. Many spirits I knew there left when I did and came here to earth to live lives incarnate, separate from mine, most of them; with the chance of interception, a few of them; the promise of reuniting, only a couple of them. The understanding that we would all, eventually, return to our star community was what gave us the will and the hope of enduring life on this troubled world and then reuniting when our time here was through. So, when I would look up at that cluster of stars, however many light years away it may be, it was— and to this day, still is —the home to which I long to return. It is more beautiful than anyplace I can imagine, here on earth or in my fantasies. I know this, because I have traveled there in meditation and in my dreams many, many times over the years.
Trikola tells me that she and I have known each other in numerous lifetimes here on earth, but that we were never meant to be a couple; that is, we were never what some New Agers, well-meaning but ill-informed, might refer to as “soul mates.” There is a difference between “soul mates” and “spirit mates.” Tina and I, as in love as we were by the time we returned from Africa, were not soul-mates I have recently learned. But that is another story for another time.
It’s this matter of the heart and the head you have to sort out: soul-mates versus spirit mates.
Do I live by the heart? That is, do I guide my life by virtue of how situations feel? Do I make major life decisions based upon my, as far as I know, slowly-developing intuition? Or do I work only with my five senses, with whatever physical, empirical evidence I can muster, and go on intellect alone? After all, isn’t that what science and philosophy tell us? Math? Virtually everything we learned in school? Think, boy! Think!
What were you thinking?
Think before you speak!
Okay, let’s all put our thinking caps on, boys and girls.
You’ve got another think coming!
Let’s think this through, shall we?
What do you think?
I think . . .
Yes, I think. But I don’t know.
I can’t know. Not until I’ve squeezed the tube. And if I’m wrong, it’s too late. It’s impossible to put the toothpaste back where it came from.
I have spent my life feeling things. I don’t feel just emotions, although I am irrevocably and unapologetically an emotional romantic, and romantics are by nature wanderers and dreamers. Thus, it can be said that romantics do not think or rationalize . . . And yet, I have spent my life rationalizing away those feelings, those gut instincts, that informed me in all matters of my living. How many times have I known— not intellectually, not factually, but instinctively —that something I was about to do, or had been considering doing or saying, was the path I was meant to take, and then rationalized myself right out of doing or saying it? Only to look back later and think to myself,
shoulda . . . coulda . . . woulda.
Except . . .
Except that I was raised and taught not to trust my emotions. To ignore my gut feeling. Not bad enough that in school I was always taught to research, to learn, to “go with what you know “ (and in the proper context, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with these endeavors— I use them and encourage others to do the same). But at home I was chided as well by friends and family for believing in the unseen, the unusual, the weird, the “you-can’t-do-that." How many times, as I look back, did rationalizing my way through a situation result in the correct, or at least, the most desired, outcome? Few. Very few.
On the other hand, how many times, upon serious reflection, can I see, clear and real as yesterday’s rain storm, that my heart was telling me to do one thing, my head another, and then, after the opportunity was gone, saw that I would have been far better off if I had followed my heart? I may not have gotten any closer to the outcome I was hoping for, but I felt better about myself; I slept contentedly.
How many times has my heart shown me the gold of the sun at the top of the mountain, and my head the dark valley below?
So when I say that I have a spirit guide who talks to me, I can picture the expression on your face; I can see the roll of your eyes and hear those thoughts you’re too polite to say out loud: that I’m Deluded. Wishful. Crazy. Sorry. Riding unicorns. Not to be taken seriously— if I ever was in the first place. And I, along with you, am just as inclined to think these same things about myself. You hear thought “voices,” Johnson? Got a guardian angel, duo you? An entity from another plane and dimension who gives you advice and tells you how to handle certain life situations? Occasionally gives you a glimpse of the near future without going into the predicting business?
Pretty kooky stuff, right? Not the stuff a serious, educated person would for a moment entertain. It’s fairy tales. Idiocy. Over-stimulated imagination borne of loneliness or desire or just plain wishful thinking. But reality? The material world? Your “guide” has nothing to do with it, because there is no guide. You just wish there were. Would that we all actually had such a one, but we don’t. There’s absolutely no evidence that any such beings exist. None. Zip. No scientific basis whatsoever. Nothing of our five senses to verify such ridiculous claims. Get your head out of the clouds, Johnson (or whatever dark dank place you have it in), and start living in the real world.
Yes, I tell myself these things. Emphatically. Right after I receive a thought communication from Trikola, who cannot possibly exist anywhere but in my own imagination, and who tells me things I had no way of knowing, or did not know until she told me— things about other people, about facts from history. She tells me to be patient for things I cannot see, things I cannot envision happening under any circumstances. Ever. She tells me, “'Patience is a virtue,' as they say. Yes, but it is so much more than that. It is an exercise in learning to live, as a spirit, as much as a human. Maybe more. For spirits are timeless and eternal, so patience is not something one needs to possess on the higher levels. Patience is relative only to situations where time is involved, and unfortunately, in your realm on earth, time is a commodity humans hold more valuable than gold or precious stones, or anything else of worth, short of life itself.
“Time is the manufacturer of impatience, and it is this “product,” if you will, that causes so much distress among your people, because you are of the belief that time is constantly running out. But, don’t you see? There is no time. Your great mathematician and scientist Albert Einstein himself said that time is relevative, that is, an invention of man’s mind. For what does time have to do with eternity? And we are all products of our eternal Creator, for whom time has no meaning.”
Yet, those same people who will tell me I’m imagining things, deluded, fantasizing, will kneel at their bedsides in the darkness and pray to a god unseen, a god no more known or understood than my guide Trikola, and will listen for that “still, small voice” in answer. They will follow what they believe God has told them to do. They will have no rational basis for doing or believing or even saying what they do, and yet they will subscribe to the guidance because they believe. If they applied the scientific method or logic or just plain common sense to it, they would know how ridiculous prayer and hearing God’s voice looks and sounds. Then they will start a movement or a war or declare their love for what appears to be no reason at all except their own delusional beliefs that there are entities beyond our range of senses, beyond our material reach telling them to do so.
Try as I might to outthink myself, I find myself believing in the unbelievable. Defying logic. Succumbing to the irrational and the unseen. Why? Because my heart tells me they are real. Because my head is limited by the five senses my earthly body was issued. All functioning well, but able to divine only the material world. What of thought? Faster than light, lighter than nothing. Able to penetrate anything, see anything, know anything. What of love? How heavy? How pungent? How old? Reduce it to chemicals in the brain, I dare you. Ignore quantum physics if you will.
So slip away, Heath. You did the right thing. You told her you loved her.
If, then, she and the world paint you as a madman, a delusional fool, so be it. You followed your heart.
