The heart is truly an amazing thing. The recently passed jazz icon Dave Brubeck once said, “One of the reasons I believe in jazz is that the oneness of man can come through the rhythm of your heart. It’s the same anyplace in the world, that heartbeat. It’s the first thing you hear when you’re born — or before you’re born — and it’s the last thing you hear.” Indeed at 91, he died, poetically, of heart failure. The first rhythm we hear is our mother’s heart drumming into our forming consciousness and the last, our own thumping its final notes of Taps before we take leave.

I remember watching that first little blip flicker on the screen when my babies were 6 weeks old in my womb. That flicker later becoming an audible gallop under the wand and jelly being traced across my swelling belly. Finally, it was a throb I could feel under my palm as I rubbed lavender lotion on their rosy, post-bath skin. Their heartbeats like a poem from the very start, a declaration, YES! to this life.

I am in awe at how the heart can weather so many insults and injuries and yet continue to expand. I have felt that tightening in my chest, that stony ache, and struggle to breathe when my heart has been broken. I have my own collection of bitterly painful childhood lacerations, have endured the loss of babies whose faces and souls I never was allowed to behold, and have experienced my share of disappointments in love. My heart has felt weary and raw and yet, at the sight of the sun melting in the sky, or buckets of brown-paper wrapped tulip bouquets at the grocery store, or at the touch of sweetly soft lips grazing my cheek, it blossoms once more. Each time it thrives, I believe it becomes more magnificent and spacious and capable of loving more, and with hope, able to love all.

Rilke wrote, “Our hearts transcend us.”

Yes please to that.

Yes.