Dysautonomia

Dysautonomia

Maybe it’s a quirk
of my nervous
system—

signals never sent
or never received,

vessels who don’t
know when
to constrict,
a heart
too quick to
take up the slack.

Maybe it’s a quirk,
or maybe our thoughts 

all run bloodless
when we hold our heads
too high. 

Photo by Aziz Acharki on Unsplash

The Prompt

My heart isn’t always as effective as I would like it to be at pumping blood uphill to my brain. This means that, as a general rule, I think more clearly if I place my head below my heart. I mean this literally, but I love the metaphor of it, too. We live in many ways in a head-over-heart society. We are taught to prize and trust reason and to suppress and distrust emotion. In recent years, I’ve lived a little more from my heart and a little less from my head and found that doing so makes me feel happier, more connected, more alive, and more fulfilled.

What’s the relationship between your head and your heart? What positions do they hold relative to one another and relative to how you live your life? When you’re making a decision, who do you call on first, head or heart? Which one speaks the loudest? Which one rings the truest?

What messages have you absorbed (or resisted) about rationality? About emotion? About objectivity and subjectivity and where truth is found?

If you take a few deep breaths and then turn your attention to the sensations and activity within your head, what do you find there? If you take a few deep breaths and turn your attention to your heart, what is it holding?

Now imagine your head bowing down or your heart lifting up so that the two sit side by side. Imagine them on a couch, if you’d like. What sort of conversation might they have with each other? Feel free to throw conversational topics at them and see what happens.

Somewhere in all this pondering and noticing and imagining and somberness or silliness, did you sense a spark? A pull or invitation? If so, let that be your prompt. See what follows from there. I look forward to reading your poems and comments, dear hearts!

P.S. My van saga continues. At some still unspecified point in time, I will be dropping everything for another 1100-mile roundtrip drive to retrieve my vehicle, and it’s possible that I’ll slip out of my normal twice-a-week posting rhythm when that happens. Good thing I only promised 100 poems for the year and not 104!