The path of one man's heart

Ross sees in geometric shapes. He is certain that the ether of the universe is cylindrical, that its form has mathematical properties. He works feverishly on the outskirts of physics, where the renegades of mainstream science map out farfetched impossibilities.

Ross is an engineer in an small enclave of engineers. He is one of perhaps a hundred running small businesses in an industrial park in the Sierra Nevadas. They turn out everything from circuit boards to pewter chess pieces to electronic flood control devices - anything that feeds their need to express creativity through mechanistic logic. Ross makes tools and metal brackets in the front of his shop, but his heart's path is in the back room, where the theory of ether shape lives in the pages of his painfully detailed manifesto, and in crude sketches of a circle within a circle. When I met Ross, he was trying to raise money to have the book illustrated, the final step before publication.

The machine shop was Ross's livelihood, but he waved it off impatiently. It was merely a necessity for the path of his heart, which insisted on the full capacity of his mind and made him an outcast among his peers, but that he had no choice but to follow, lest his mind die, and his spirit with it. He bore the weight of this irony with a tired smile, knowing the very thing that made him sane made the rest of the world believe he was crazy.

Ross's back room is why practical people let go of dreams and follow a well-worn path - a safe and reasonable way to live, one that sometimes leaves us flat and less than alive, but alive nonetheless. The well-worn path is that of a rational mind on solid ground. On it, the world turns, but never moves forward, and it is this forward movement the heart craves, sometimes above all else.

Upon the will of such hearts is built an industry of encouragement. Follow your heart, this industry teaches, and it will lead you to where you belong, to the work that is naturally yours. We see shining examples of people who followed their heart to great success and happiness, and this, we are told, is where the heart's path inevitably leads.

It also leads elsewhere - to the darkest part of one's soul, to the deepest of tribulations, to the loneliest of moments. The path of the heart defies logic and reason. It leaves one naked and bare before the world. It requires all of one's courage and energy, and may never yield the treasure of its promise. This, too, can be the path of the heart. A lonely back room. An insistent vision. A head full of images but a mute drawing hand. No place in the world to belong.

I pray that Ross lives long enough to prove his theory, but I don't know enough about physics to know if that can ever be. I do know enough about the heart to know he has no choice in this life but to give shape to the ether. And I do know that several months after I met Ross, I was given a gift by a priest of the mystic arts - a deck of elements - five cards with shapes representing earth, air, fire, water, and their combination, ether. These he fashioned for meditation, using simple shapes based on ancient glyphs - a bisected square, a half-circle, two triangles and a circle within a circle - like the end of a cylinder. Like the path of one man's heart.

Monday, January 11, 1999

Copyright 2010 by Deborah McAdams. All Rights Reserved. For Reprint Rights, click here.