True Story Of A Heart
I live on Scotland Island, in one of the wildest urban environments in Sydney. It is boat-access only, the roads are either disintegrating or partially unsealed and the residents collect their own water. There is no such thing as kerbing or guttering – and there are no shops. The dogs are free, the children are happy … and doing the weekly grocery run is like a tale from Jason and The Argonauts. Of course, there are days like stunning take-outs from the cinematography of heaven. And the trees are gods. Life here is what I like to call the real deal – beautiful and tough.
Back in July last year, as I rushed to the ferry, I noticed what I thought was a hand-cut, heart-shaped decoration lying in the middle of the road. It made me smile – on a day when I needed to smile – and then I forgot all about it. I saw it again a few days later – and then a few weeks – and was surprised to realise it was a randomly broken piece of eucalyptus leaf, shaped only by the hands of nature.
For the past three months, I have watched this tiny heart, about the size of fifty-cent piece, and marvelled at its capacity to survive.
People have stepped on it. The rain has thundered down the hill and over it in raging monsoonal torrents. Vehicles of every description have flattened it. It has been baked and burnt and defecated on. Children have run across it. Insects have marched back and forth across the boot marks on its otherwise perfect face. But for all that time this unlikely little heart has persisted, moving not one jot – not one iota – even though it lies on a stretch of road leading down to one of the island’s most public, well trodden and weather-exposed wharves.
Who would have thought?
I’m a sucker for signs. So to me it is a reminder that true love survives against the odds – and not just romantic love, but the truest love of all, that of living and giving. We are all hearts made by the great storms of experience. Maybe we have been fashioned out of one thing – our joys, our tragedies, our hard-won experience – to become another. And maybe without those difficulties we’d all just be so many leaves in the wind.
It is incredible to think that one solitary leaf could take on a shape so unexpectedly perfect and beautiful that it has the potential to make the world around it smile, to bring it meaning.
I am this heart.
And so are you.
Against the odds, a leaf in the wind took on the shape of a heart that could not be broken by forces that should have been so much greater than itself.
Keep the faith 🙂
PS UnConquered Sun – my tale of the triumph of light over darkness – is available now at http://itun.es/i6FH53L