I found my way back home through an orange soapstone heart. I bought it for my daughter at the De Young Art Museum gift shop in Golden Gate Park when she was still heavy into her orange period. I noticed it on her desk last night as I lay in her loft bed with my face pressed 4-inches from the ceiling. She was reading Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The Third Wheel aloud to me. My eyes were darting around the room looking for some space to help ease my claustrophobia. They landed on the orange bulge and curve of the soapstone heart and rested there as she read.
This morning I awoke to a heavy heart. Plagued by doubt, an intimate companion of every writer, I grabbed the soapstone heart from her desk and brought it with me to the blank page. No words came, just weight. I put my hands all over the cold, hard, smoothness. I rolled it against my cheek and then let it rest heavy in the palm of my hand. I felt gravity. Through the heart I became intimate with the invisible force that keeps and holds me to the Earth.
I was pulled down in to a moment of fat, full-heart, orange delight. With its heaviness in my hand, lightness suddenly became available.
The orange heart-stone reminded me that without gravity I would not be here, longing to give voice to human tendency. The dense stone brought me in to the solidity and mass of a single moment—how the truth of it, heavy and swollen can offer space and bring lightness.
I placed the heart back on my daughter’s desk, picked up my pen and filled the empty page.
words and photo © Samantha Wallen 2013