Deeply encouraged by the division it inspires and gives platform to, I was happy to leave social media for these last six years. Sadly, our necessary move from a beautiful, manageable, and happy environment to one that is a daily struggle against its many forms of darkness has left me crowded among many more people than back home, but more isolated than ever. Driven by this isolation, I logged back on to the platform of distress calls, advertising, and endless videos of cats and dogs.

In addition to the reels of huskies howling and “talking back” to their humans, there's a video series of toddlers just being toddlers. This evening I watched one of these fifteen second shorts that featured a little girl who was two or three; her big eyes surrounded by a full head of auburn hair. She was absolutely precious and absolutely devastated. Devastated. Tears streamed down her face, as she ugly cried, her nearly brand new heart completely broken. As I watched her melt down, I wondered what could have happened. Had a toy been taken, had a pet died? No, as I listened, she explained through her sobbing that she couldn't stop thinking about waffles. Seriously. That's what she said. Her mother calmly explained that they had had waffles for dinner and breakfast but now they needed to eat something else. This broke her heart each time her mother said it. She would catch her breath and struggle to control her sobs, only to lose it again as she tearfully explained like a defeated drug addict, “I’m trying…I am, but I just can't stop thinking about waffles,” and she would collapse into her helplessness again. It broke my heart with a smile on my face. Nearly sixty years her senior, I understand well the heartbreak of helplessness, of feeling powerless over my own thoughts, of making my mind up about what I’ll do and having  my mind undo my willpower with a will of its own.

This is such hard work, this work of surrender. The “thorns of our flesh” Apostle Paul refers to are precisely so problematic because they resist extraction; unlike an actual thorn, they can't just be taken out, allowing us to treat the wound while it smarts and move on. No, the thorn stays and now what?

Our powerlessness remains real. Reality demanding surrender is our only shared reality, as my grandmother used to say, “like it or lump it”. We can medicate ourselves with whatever is available, meditate until our lotus-positioned limbs are numb, and pray ourselves to exhaustion but if none of this tills our heart, if we continue to treat our minds as our only control center, we eventually crumble back into our helplessness again, felled by our obsessive minds, obsessed with shame and perfection and resentment; brought low again by something as simple as waffles; waffles and our untended hearts.

I recently read Dr. Anita Phillips book, “The Garden Within”. In this slim volume she makes a solid case for how our hearts were created to be a garden and how we tend that soil will directly contribute to the health of the fruit our thoughts and minds bear. One way that I understand this is that I can do my honest best to “not think about waffles” but if what my heart really believes is that we’re not having waffles again because I’m not worthy of it or because you don't love me, my mind, whether that mind is three or sixty three, will continue to fixate on those waffles. 

This is my experience. Whatever my mind's obsession of the moment might be, from food to fear to political despair, it's what my heart believes that makes my mind easier to deceive. If we don't tend our hearts, and understand, not what we want to be true but what we really believe, we can expect our minds to be out of control. Our core beliefs, what our hearts know, how they're hurt and healed or abandoned and cold, will always and every time, run the show of how our thoughts flow. 

Quiet minds are the natural outcome of healing hearts. A mind slower to respond, not just kindly, but at all, is cultivated in us as we patiently, kindly weed and tend the furrows of our heart soil, being present with Presence in our internal garden is the way to let the sunshine in.

- pdk