Change of Heart

I've a question for you.

Do you feel your heart, your emotional center, is changing?

I'm sure it is different than when you were a child. I'm sure that when school let out for the summer the warmth of the sun shone on you a lot like the way your heart shone its joy of being alive and free and... well, of being eight.

It changed along the way. There were hurts and joys, mysteries and discoveries, all shaped how you felt.

I feel my heart changing.

It isn't just the big changes that have happened... It seems an ongoing process. I feel my heart changing in a steady way that makes the swift changes just obstacles along the road of my life. The movement on the road has always continued.

Two great sorrows, the death of my child and the death of my marriage, broke my heart, but it mended. Major changes which reformed me the way a smith's hammer on hot metal.

But the other changes... the ordinary changes... Like what I am feeling now, I'm fascinated by them.

I feel my heart changing steadily. I find myself loving everyone, everything, a little more each day.

I have especially noticed a deeper emotional response to worship. When I worship my mind and heart fill with the scope of existence, the galaxies spread across 20 billion or more light years; I imagine the tiny strings at the deepest skein of the fabric of the universe, following the shuttles of physics in the loom of all things; I picture in my mind's eye the pulsing death throws of Beetlegeuse, swelling, deepening, preparing to die... I imagine the deaths of quasars and of may flies and my heart swells.

Even in talking or writing of such things my pulse quickens, my tongue grows thick, my eyes moisten. It is all so lovely.

And it seems to me, there is something about my heart, something about my life, that continues to change, continues to grow.

Is this unique to me? Do others experience such change? I note my father seems to gentle as he ages... Do we all?

So, dear reader, do you feel your heart, your emotional center, is changing?