Sunbonnet Soliloquy

By Jewell Ellen Smith

Something of the Heart

Thoughts do not grow on trees.

Nor do they bubble up out of the ground.

Thoughts cannot ride in with the wind or the rain, nor, with the blazing rays of the sun or the cold beams of the moon.

Where do our thoughts, or ideas, come from?

One answer is this: Thoughts are born within us ,with the mind as their father, and the heart as their mother.

Fortunately, we have a great deal of control over our minds. And we can improve our hearts. In a physical sense we can even have a faulty heart replaced. But that’s not what we’re talking about. We are considering the heart in the sense that it is the seat of life or strength, and, one s entire emotional nature and understanding.

There are hearts of all kinds. Take a look at this sample dozens of the different kinds:

A kind heart.

A loving heart.

A big heart.

A hard heart.

A broken heart.

A glad heart.

A corrupt heart.

A cheerful heart.

A faint heart.

A stout heart.

A tender heart.

A noble heart.

Some time back, I began making a collection of sayings and expressions that have to do with the heart. Wherever and whenever I heard a good one, I jotted it down.

At a flea market in eastern Kentucky one summer, I overheard two women talking in sad tones of a mutual friend who had recently passed away.

One said, “She died of pure heart grief, nothing else”.

“Yes, that’s about the size of it,” the other replied.

Soon after we came to the Wire-grass area, I talked with a local man who had seen how the Great Depression affected this area. And he told of an older man, a part owner of an Alabama cotton mill, who had used his life’s saving to keep the mill open, part time. This, so that the mill workers would have jobs and their children would not go hungry.

“Why,” I asked.

“That old man.” he declared, “had a heart in him as big as a mule! That’s all there was to it”.

In south Arkansas, I once listened as a plain-speaking lady described --with much sympathy, even pity-- two sisters who for years and years had kept a nice dress shop. Then, as the women grew older, their customers became fewer and fewer until finally they had to close the shop.

“It wasn’t on account of business being bad all over town,” the lady explained. “It was them. Both of them women. Their hearts had done petrified to stone!”

Here at Fort Rucker -- it’s been some years back now -- I heard an Army wife who had been a nurse make a fine speech about how Army wives could look on the bright side of things and not let themselves get discouraged, or down in the dumps, or homesick.

Exactly what all she said I don’t recall, but her climaxing thought was this proverb: “A merry heart doeth good like a medicine”.

Now that I am on the wrong side of seventy, it is necessary to double all efforts in searching for what is good for mind and heart.

Last week I came across this gem:

“Memory, wit, fancy, acuteness, cannot grow young again in old age; but the heart can”.

It is not good, though, to gather great ideas about the mind and heart, or anything else, and not pass them on. Thus, I offer you from the writings of the American poet Longfellow, who has been dead 106 years, these lines which will live a thousand years:

“Something the heart must have to cherish;

Must love, and joy, and sorrow learn:

Something with passion clasp, or perish,

And in itself to ashes burn”.

In days to come, let your own heart be the mother, and your mind the father, of thoughts to be remembered.

Published September 1988. Click your browser’s “Back” button to return.