What is Your Heart Made Of?
By Nancy King
Hearts of Stone and Snow and Earth and Ice
No one talked about my life with my parents until after they died, and then, only when I pressed an issue. It was as though a door opened a crack, they told me a little, and then the door slammed shut again. While visiting my Uncle Dave, my father’s middle brother, he told me that my paternal grandmother had asked her three adult children about me when my father wasn’t there: “What are they doing to that child? She’s a stone. She comes here and sits on the edge of the chair. She doesn’t eat. She doesn’t smile. She doesn’t talk. What are they doing to her?” When I anxiously asked my uncle what they answered, he shrugged and changed the subject. None of my father’s siblings or their spouses were willing to say anything negative about my father. To them he was the older brother who took care of them. They didn’t want to hear how he was obsessed with me, how he refused to protect me from my mother’s violence, and why I was a stone child.
Shortly after moving to Santa Fe I went to see a highly recommended body worker. We talked briefly and then she told me to lie down on her table. Gently laying her hands on my body, she began with my feet and stopped at a spot just above my waist. Her hands remained there for what felt like a long time, but was probably about a minute, and then she asked me to sit up. “I can’t help you,” she said. “You have a boulder blocking your heart.” She gave me a glass of water and left the room. I left her studio, stunned. What did it mean to have a boulder blocking my heart? And if she was as good as she was reputed to be, why couldn’t she help me. Maybe my grandmother was right. I was a stone. Nothing to be done.
For years I hiked with a friend. Occasionally she found a heart-shaped stone on the hiking trail; I almost never saw any. She even found one in my driveway. I wondered why she found them and I didn’t, even though we looked in the same places. Didn’t I deserve to find them? I felt bereft every time she found one, often when I had looked and seen none. It was only after we stopped hiking together that I began to see stone hearts. Every time I saw one, I felt my heart lighten, even if it was temporary.
I often picked up the stone hearts I found and took them home, propping them up along the walls in my bathroom, like an altar to nature. After the space along the walls was filled, I put them on the tops of surfaces in other rooms. They remind me that stone hearts radiate love no matter how hard the surface.
When the pandemic hit, my hiking buddies stopped hiking in groups of any size, even with masks. I vowed to continue hiking three times a week, although it meant going everywhere by myself. I mostly hiked on a steep trail that few people know about, making it safer from people, less so if I fell and hurt myself. No matter. The need to be in the mountains was greater than my fear of injury. Not even the time I scared off two bears by screaming, or when I tripped over a root and fell on my face, or the time I slipped and fell down a steep sandy incline dissuaded me from solo hiking. I needed to hike, regularly, on a challenging trail. Being in the mountains helped me feel connected to myself. Nourished. The inner darkness with which I live lightened. The more I hiked, the more heart stones I found. The more heart stones I saw, the more my heart softened.
When winter snows covered the path. I often had to break trail—once in a foot of snow—which meant that I hiked on a snowy trail that no one had been on, trying to find my way. Slogging through the deep snow, one foot in front of the other, was exhausting. What kept me going was something I’d never seen before—snow hearts and ice hearts and earth hearts and ice hearts on snow. Every heart I found warmed my heart.
Finding snow and ice hearts and earth hearts surrounded by snow always takes me by surprise. I stop and feel the wonder of their fragility—something to be appreciated in the moment. Hearts I see hiking up the trail have sometimes melted by the time I hike down—only the photos I’ve taken remain, visual treasures of heart power.
My grandmother was right. I was a stone in many ways. For most of my life. I learned too early, after experiencing too much and too many kinds of pain, that it was never safe to show what I felt, to say what I thought. I disconnected from myself. But the stone hearts and the snow hearts and the ice hearts and the earth hearts let me know every time I see one that I’m no longer a stone. I now have friends who want to know how I feel, who help me figure out what I’m feeling when I don’t really know. And if I’m ever in doubt, all it takes to feel love is to see a heart of any kind when I’m on the trail.
Santa Fe-based Nancy King’s new memoir, Breaking the Silence, (Terra Nova Press) is available online at bookshop.org and amazon.com Please visit www.nancykingstories.com where you order her books, read excerpts of her memoir and novels, learn about her nonfiction dealing with the power of stories, imagination, and creativity, as well as information about Nancy’s workshops. You can also order books from Nancy by contacting her at nanking1224@earthlink.net
