Vachon Imagined

The heart is life’s mechanism for expression. Because of that, it can be fickle, swayed by feeling, interpretation, circumstance, and the countless things beyond our control.

One moment your partner, early in a marriage, cannot keep their hands off you. They are captivated by your presence. Then children arrive. Exhaustion settles in. Careers demand attention. Responsibilities multiply. The mind fills with worries, plans, and obligations it cannot seem to release. The passion that once felt effortless becomes something harder to sustain.

This is not unique to marriage. It is the human condition.

We seem to be the only creatures burdened with a kind of double consciousness. The rest of nature moves with itself. Rivers flow, trees bend, birds migrate, and oceans rise and fall without questioning their purpose. Humans alone step outside the moment and examine it, judge it, resist it, and reinterpret it. Now we are even creating reflections of ourselves through artificial intelligence, extending that self-consciousness beyond the boundaries of our own minds.

The heart turns the way the ocean turns in on itself. It rises and recedes. It loves and fears. It clings and lets go. It is a fickle creature, and because it is fickle, human beings are fickle.

Perhaps this is why so many spiritual traditions caution us against placing our ultimate trust in people. Not because people are bad, but because they possess self-will. They have their own desires, fears, choices, and destinies, many of which have nothing to do with us. We suffer when we expect permanence from what was never meant to remain unchanged.

Yet the heart is not merely unreliable. It is also one of the ways life moves through us. Through it flows affection, grief, longing, wonder, devotion, courage, and mercy. Through it life expresses itself as the brilliant explosion we call existence.

And perhaps, through the heart, everything returns as well.

Not through a divided heart that wants two things at once. Not through a manipulative heart, a fearful heart, or a heart consumed by its own reflection. But through a heart that has been purified by surrender. A heart that is undivided. A heart that has become transparent to something greater than itself.

A heart that, dare I say, has become saintly.