If my heart began to think my head would start to feel.

My Bleeding Hearts are soon to come into full bloom.

These Dicentra (Bleeding Hearts), make my heart tell my head it’s good to be alive! My garden is a cornucopia of emotion, filled with splendor and an encyclopedia of knowledge for my head. Together they make me feel whole and complete.
_________________________

Mornings are hard one me, taking much too long to reach cogency. It is as if I need the medicine (Celexa – Citalopram) to feel a few pounds lighter and ambulate. I’m at war with myself and my body is like the battered ground affected by that war.

Van Morrison said in the lyrics of a song that if his heart could do his thinking his head would begin to feel.

The war between what your emotions tell you and what your head informs you to be real. A life ruled by passion or logic. My passions have too often caused my head to forget its role before passion tears me apart. At other times, my head has blocked my passions to convince me of truth. There in lies the balance, when one's passion or the head rules over the other the balance is gone. When your heart tells you it is true your head should be able to see it clearly as well. If not then something may very well be unbalanced in your perspective.

I have done this with love, confusing love for infatuation for example. I began a quest for love similar, to the Greek/Roman God Apollo chasing after Daphne, who fled from his embrace and turned into a laurel tree. Being just a mere mortal I found myself continually chasing love but in the end the pain of the chase drove me to want to kill off all my emotions using hard-drugs. (I did a painting discussing this subject based on Apollo’s son Phaethon – click to view.)

That is why I wanted to take the medicine (mentioned above), to be able to discern between my passion and ardor and what my minds perceives to be true. If love is truly blind, then I consider my mind the blind person’s white walking stick, to lead me through the labyrinth and out of the maze of the Minotaur.
I consciously choose to live my life ruled by passion for a few years. What it got me was to want to suppress all my feelings because they took me to a place of pain and heartbreak as mentioned above. Had my mind kicked in, or rather had I of listened to its scream, I’d of seen more clearly that I was on a path towards peril. The passion alone was not enough to help me see and I had suppressed my mind from doing its job. The outcome was depression, which is an emotion until it starts to take over your mind as well. I can’t live there anymore; my critical mind is part of the corpus of my being also. Now I spend the time trying to find the balance between the two. Maybe I’ll find that balance, I’m praying that I will and I feel that I will. I’m also relaxed enough to give it some time, as my short lives experiences of these last 50 years also make up what I am; I can therefore wait for healing.
The one thing I will not do is let my passion rule me as I’m tired of living like a leaf tossed back and forth in a stream, even if it is a stream of consciousness. My mind tells me this is the best path and my heart agrees.

I’m writing this because a friend came by my studio and told me their 14 yr. old sister is refusing to take the same medicine as I use. She often finds herself in a fetal position on the floor unable to deal with the day. Her reason for not taking the meds is that she wants to feel and thinks the medicine might be suppressing her emotions. I want her to realize that if you let the passion rule your life entirely and not inform it with your mind, sometimes the outcome defeats the goal, as your life slowly sinks into the emotion of despondency. I’m not saying take the medicine. I am saying look at where your emotions are taking you and then question if this is the outcome you desire; use your mind to discern. Laying on the floor in a fetal position, feeling the weight of your emotions, and letting them handicap or constrain your ability to effect change is not a happy place to be.

I’ve been there. When I saw the underlying issues, I was able to let my mind fulfill its purpose and help solve some of the problems thus lifting the cloud of depression, so that I could act. If this is all the meds do then they are a success. Yes, if there just used as happy pills it defeats the purpose.

If happiness is a state of mind, then use that mind, informed by your emotions to find the peace you’re looking for. For me it came as an intervention by God and my own will to survive. If not for this, I might have listened to my heart and these pages would have been blank, as my mind would have perished into oblivion and decay through the cold embrace of death. This is not what I wanted or where I wanted passion to take me. God opened my heart to see that life is the greatest gift of all, why would I allow only my emotions to take that gift away, as much as I wouldn’t want my mind to rob me of the joy of life itself.

G.P.
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I Forgot That Love Existed

I forgot that love existed troubled in my mind.
Heartache after heartache, worried all the time.
I forgot that love existed
Then I saw the light
Everyone around me make everything alright.
Oh, oh Socrates and Plato they
Praised it to the skies.
Anyone who's ever loved
Everyone who's ever tried.

If my heart could do my thinking
And my head begin to feel
I would look upon the world anew
And know what's truly real.

Van Morrison from - Poetic Champions Compose