Around 500 years ago, while observing corpses, Leonardo da Vinci did a number of beautifully rendered, anatomically correct drawings of the human heart.
This past week, I did my own research on the body/trunk of a tree and found out some interesting things about “its” heart.
Eight hundred million years before Leonardo took pen to paper, in the late Proterozoic Era, a very simple kind of heart was to be found in the earliest marine invertebrates and consisted of a muscular tube which squeezed rhythmically and moved blood-like liquid by peristaltic contraction.
Slowly, thousands of years upon thousands of years, the slow evolution of heart preceded beat by beat. Eventually, invertebrate hearts started pumping and, in ever increasing complexity over millions of years, from fish to amphibians to reptiles to mammals to humans, our four-chambered heart evolved.
As excited as I get about the science of hearts, the symbolic and metaphoric role hearts play in our imagination provides me with an equal amount of fascination.
Around 400 years ago, William Shakespeare wrote that there “were tongues in trees”, perhaps meaning that trees had something to tell us.
Looking closely at the slice of tree, its age is around 70 years. What’s interesting is that the tree’s “heart” didn’t start to take shape until the tree was 25 years old or older. More importantly, the shaping of the heart, its creation, was the result of some disturbance to its growth. Animal? Lightening? Disease? Who knows? But it was this scarring that led to the formation of the heart.
The essence of being human is that within the heart resides the symbolic seat of all emotions: love and hate, fear or courage, sorrow or joy, compassion or indifference.
As Leonardo blended science and art through his renderings in pen, pencil and paintbrush of his close observations of nature, I choose to observe nature closely so that I can better learn to live wisely with a good heart. My art is an expression of nature’s lessons.
To me, there is something truthful in the shaping of the tree’s heart by scarring, and, by way of analogy, how our human heart — this great seat of human emotions — only begins maturing after our young hearts have been massaged with every emotion imaginable: from bursting open with first love, to, and possibly more powerfully, broken apart with despair. It is then that we start the move towards becoming adults with a capacity for compassion, tolerance and forgiveness.
And here I use the word “capacity” cautiously because a split-open heart doesn’t guarantee a kind heart. It takes many years surrounded by other kinder hearts to guide us towards wisdom capable of delivering an enduring happiness.
When did emotions get involved in evolution? Perhaps, during the big Bang.
When did humans divide off spiritually and soulfully from their plant and animal ancestors? Perhaps they never did.
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