Sunday, February 18, 2024

Lessening Heart Hums


We appear to be in the WTF phase of Childwinter.  According to the Universal Solar Calendar, yesterday was Quickwint Sidelong Blur, whatever that means. Today is equally ambiguous: Lessening Heart Hums. 

I have no idea what that means either. The diminishing sound of a humming heart? The humming of a failing heart?  "Hums" is plural, but it's not clear if it's supposed to be a noun or a verb. 

I meditated on the name a bit, and the best I can come up with is it refers to the way humans cling to fading love. The "lessening heart" is a metaphor for falling out of love, and "hums" refers to the sad, lonely music we use to console ourselves, or to deny the fact that the thrill is gone, as B.B. King would say.

The Buddha taught that the root of our suffering is our attachments, our human tendency to cling to things long after they're gone. The reason heartache is universally the cause of so much suffering - from Greek tragedies to country-and-western songs - is that we cling to the way we felt about a partner in the past, or the way we thought that partner felt about us in the past. We want what no longer exists, and we suffer as a consequence.

We are in the thick of Childwinter - the 49th day with 24 more still to go. It is when we are the most isolated from one another - nestled as we are in out homes, hunkered around the hearth for warmth. We lose ourselves in fantasies and nostalgia, and wonder where our love went wrong all those years ago.  The dead of Childwinter is as appropriate a time to observed Lessening Heart Hums as any.

There's a very high probability that I've got it completely wrong and old Angus MacLise had nothing at all like this in mind. The Universal Solar Calendar basically began as a poem. Perhaps he just liked the phonetic sounds of the words,  although chanting them over and over as a mantra doesn't reveal any new beauty to the sounds, at least not to me. We'll never know. I'll never know.

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