Blog post and photo by Susan Beal
As the saying goes, “Seeing is believing,” but it is equally true that “Believing is seeing.” They are not opposites, and yet they’re often perceived that way, just as a rational, scientific world view is often seen as the opposite of a spiritual, magical world view. So it's good to remember that we shape the world and the world shapes us, and there is magic in that.
My husband, David, and I just returned from a long camping trip, traveling cross country with our camper van from Vermont, through Michigan and the northern states to Washington, down the coast to California, cross the Mojave desert to Santa Fe, and then eastward toward home. We like to collect heart-shaped rocks when we travel, to bring home as a memento of the places we’ve been. We have a large collection of them on our mantlepiece, from many places around the US and the world. On our camping trip, we found heart-shaped rocks on the shores of Great Lakes, on riverbanks in Montana, at ferry docks in Washington, ocean beaches and redwood forests in California, and even in a few parking lots and truck stops along the way.
It usually takes a bit of time to find a good heart shaped rock. Sometimes there are very few candidates and the best we can do is find a rock with only a the vaguest resemblance to a heart. But more often, we can find at least one rock with a definite, if slightly distorted, heart shape—good enough to bring home and add to our collection.
Finding something is as much about filtering out what you don’t want as it is about finding what you do want. You have to set your intention and have a focus, a perceptual lens that filters what you’re seeing in favor of what you’re looking for. We all do this all the time, consciously and unconsciously, as a way of managing the continuous stream of information coming in from the worlds within and around us. Unfortunately, it’s the same feature that sets us up for bias and prejudice and limits what we sense or comprehend. We lose the ability to see things we aren’t looking for or don’t believe in. And even if we do believe, the climate of skepticism that characterizes our world acts like smog in the atmosphere, clouding all but the most confident and acute perception.
One morning of our camping trip, we were staying at a campground in Big Sur, California. I ventured down to explore the bank of the Big Sur river, which ran through the campground, and sent out a little request to find a heart shaped rock that might like to come home with us. It wasn’t long before I found a nice one. I pocketed it, delighted with my find. Then I found another, and then several more.
I started getting quite selective, searching for the ever-more perfectly shaped heart rock. As I looked around, I began to see heart-shaped rocks everywhere, in every size, in every color and texture—elongated ones, squat, wide ones, chunky and flattened ones, lumpy ones and smooth. They were grey, white, black and red, speckled, striped and solid. The more I looked, the more there were.
I think our brains are hardwired to feel good when we find things we’re looking for, probably because our hunter gatherer ancestors relied on it to survive. Pleasure centers in the brain light up so we keep searching for roots and berries and rabbits. I felt the same urgent glee on the river bank each time I found another heart shaped rock. I had started out hoping to find one, maybe two, but when more and more appeared, I felt compelled to keep gathering them. Each one I found led to another, like a trail of crumbs that might lead me to the The Perfect Heart-Shaped Rock.
After a while, however, I began to feel odd, a bit disoriented, as if I had slipped into a reality where my intention was having an effect on the material world. It felt, suddenly, as if my desire to find a heart shaped rock was magically affecting the rocks on the beach, as if little nature spirits reading my desire, quickly shaping rocks into hearts and setting them out for me to find.
It felt like manifesting on overdrive, or like being in a semi-lucid dream. I once read about ways to test if you are dreaming or awake. One of them is to jump. If you stay aloft or float gently down, you are probably dreaming. If you don’t, you’re probably awake. I jumped on the beach and landed with the usual thump. But there were still heart shaped rocks appearing everywhere, nestled among the non-heart-shaped rocks like a bumper crop of nuts. And the sense of magic persisted.
My heart opened, my perception widened and everything intensified - the glitter of sun on the river water, the ratchety calls of jays and ravens in the redwoods, the scent of campfire ashes. I fell into a slight trance. I felt suffused with gratitude. Time dropped away.
But after a while my logical brain reasserted itself. Maybe, my inner skeptic rationalized, the endorphin buzz I got when I found a heart shaped rock was prejudicing how I saw things. Maybe I was projecting heart shapes onto what were really just dented triangles and ovals, just to get that little rush.
But no. There really were a lot of rocks shaped like hearts.
Okay, my logical brain argued, there could be a geological or hydrological factor involved in the formation of rocks that looked kind of like hearts. Maybe this spot in Big Sur, on this particular river bank, had just the right conditions.
It’s possible there was some kind of geological explanation. It’s possible my perception was biased. It’s possible a bit of magic was involved. It may well have been a combination of influences. But finally, I realized what mattered was not the explanation—magical, perceptual, geological, or otherwise—for why there were so many heart shaped rocks in one place. What mattered was that I found an abundance of what I was looking for, and it made me happy.
I set aside a few of the best rocks to take home and made a mandala on the river bank of the rest. I kept having to make it bigger as I kept finding more heart shaped rocks. I have no idea if it’s still there, or how many campers may have come upon it, or what they thought. But I like to think it made them happy, maybe even inspired them to look for more heart shaped rocks to add to the mandala. And I imagine the energetic imprint of all of those heart shapes rippling outward, at least for a time, boosting the happiness quotient in that campground and even a bit beyond.
The most primal part of our nervous systems are designed to scan for threats, an instinctive bias that kicks into high gear whenever we’re traumatized or just overly stressed. When it’s activated, we interpret even the most benign things—a stick on the ground, a stranger’s frown, an unusual sound—as dangerous. We live in challenging times and our limbic systems have a rough time of it. The news media is biased toward disaster and if the headlines are to be believed, there’s little good in the world. It’s the rare person whose nervous system is not generating anxiety, seeking something to worry about.
Imagine the effect this has, not only our our own experience of the world, but on the planet, itself: millions of human nervous systems primed to see danger everywhere, interpreting their surroundings as inhospitable, their fellow humans as untrustworthy, the Earth as sick and dying.
Now imagine the effect of millions of people scanning for things that make them happy – heart shaped rocks, or the kindness of strangers, or the verification of hope. We can try to find an explanation that pares wonder down into something mundane and reasonable.
Or we can see what happens when we start looking for hearts and finding them, everywhere.
