The Origin Story of Heart Portraits

Heart portraits were born in 2018.

I was studying Reiki and learning that I had intuitive gifts I had not known about.

Wanting understand these gifts, I met with a wise woman. I brought two hearts I had created for her, one 2 years prior, the other that morning.

When I gave them to her, she asked me, “How long have you been tuning into people’s hearts?”

That question began my conscious journey with Heart Portraits.

Two days after our conversation, six years years ago, I wrote in an exercise of Julia Cameron‘s The Artist’s Way: I would like to draw peoples hearts.

Immediately in my dreams, I started receiving heart images meant for particular people. I didn’t necessarily know the people well, or have regular contact with them…

Leaning into trust that I was doing what I was called to do, I created the images and shared them with the people they were meant for. I learned quickly that the images also had messages for the recipient:

• always affirming

• always supportive

• sometimes surprising

• sometimes instructive.

The readings have evolved over time. Following guidance from Spirit, along with image and words, each session now includes essential oils and a unique sacred space.

I am honored to have been given the sacred gift of seeing peoples hearts in this way.

Without exception, every heart has been beautiful,

• even the broken ones,

• even the hurting ones,

• even the uncertain ones.

What would your heart reveal to you?

What would your beautiful heart look like today, next season, in a year?

Learn more about Heart Portraits and commission yours here.

Hope

Dear friends,

I took the above picture about 7 years ago- sunrise in Hebron, a city in the southern part of the West Bank, where over the years I've spent many months as a human rights defender. I turn to the beauty of this photo now and remember my friends there, who have also brought such beauty into my life and our world. I know they are hurting right now. So many people are hurting. 

Recently I was in a conversation about activism and different ways of practicing it and expressing ourselves as we advocate (a conversation, as someone noted, that is a result of the privilege we have since we are generally safe). In the conversation, someone said "Rage is the voice of the oppressed." I've been thinking a lot about that statement and keep coming back to this: 

Rage is a voice of the oppressed. 

So is hope.

So is grief.

So is joy.

I find myself wanting to recognize the and of it all. I find myself wanting to let all people, including "the oppressed," to be fully human in all its waves and ways. As I watch what is happening in Gaza, I, and probably you, have seen rage, grief, despair. I've also seen determination, joy, beauty, love, and even sometimes hope. I've also felt all those things myself. In my life I've been in places of devastating poverty and with people who've been subject to horrific violence and I’ve experienced in them a bent toward life, joy, and hope that seems elusive among some of us who've suffered much less.

We have a choice. 

If I ask myself, "What energy do I want to turn toward?" my answer is hope. I don't mean this in a Pollyanna or head-in-the-sand sort of way. Rage, grief, despair are healthy responses to what is happening in the world and they certainly arise in me. When they come, I try to give them attention and care and ask for help when I'm stuck in them. When I am able to let them move through me, I am not devoured by them. When they get stuck, I am consumed, immobilized, and exhausted.

When I am able to turn toward hope, my body relaxes. I am energized in a way that is sustainable and sustaining. When I turn toward hope, I can see the world I want to create instead of playing on repeat the painful parts of the world that is. When I turn toward hope, I turn toward other people, the potential of our collective power, and action. When I turn toward hope, I am more able to receive and support others who are in a different place than I am.

A few years ago I wrote this Advent piece invoking hope for JustFaith Ministries. If you are Christian (and maybe if you're not), it may speak to you. I don't claim to know the path toward the fullness of peace I wish to see in the world. But I do know how to turn toward you and toward others so we can practice together. I know that every time I've been in circles of open-hearted people, even when we've started in rage, despair, and grief, I have felt myself expand and my hope expand. 

We need each other. 

And so I turn toward you, toward us, believing that, like the sun, our hope and our action will light the world. 

With love, 
Cory

Tending

As I was leaving Kroger, a dead squirrel lay in the street, parts of this creature not meant to be outside of her pink against the street and her cinnamon-gray body.

I drove past her and then, after checking my glove compartment, turned around and pulled into the Dollar General parking lot, the closest to this sibling’s unnecessary end.

I pulled several thick paper napkins from the glove compartment. Self-conscious as cars and people passed, I walked to her and picked her up in the napkins.

“Where do I place her body?” It wasn’t yet stiff. Was I feeling warmth from it still? The blood was still fresh.

I walked to the nearest bush, and placed the corpse close to its trunk. Still aware that I was in a public space not made for death rituals, I did not take time to arrange the body, but did find a leaf to cover her mutilated head, the part of her I hope her relatives will never see.

“I’m sorry, little one.”

I walked away, got in my car and drove home, listening to the report about Gazans driving and walking miles south from their homes, carrying what few possessions they could, with little or no access to water, not knowing if they would see their homes again, not knowing if they would make it south, not knowing if going south would offer anything different from what they left.

Then and now I hope the neither Palestinians nor Israelis will see human bodies in the same condition as the squirrel I moved. Even as I type, this hope is being shot and bombed.

1200 Israelis dead so far.

2215 Palestinians dead so far.

So far.

Both numbers will rise. With the cutoff of food, water, electricity to Gaza, with hundreds of thousands of people internally displaced, with bombs and a likely ground invasion, the number of Palestinian deaths will rise more precipitously.

I don’t understand how people kill other people, no matter the reason given.

Across the world I moved a dead squirrel’s body, offering a small death ritual here because I cannot tend to the dead there.