'The Freshest Chamber of the Heart'

I'm posting this article about the chambered nautilus shell creature

 in full because it speaks directly to me and to my heart.

About living in the most recent chamber...

....only when the past is behind us and not before us can we open enough and empty enough to feel what is truly about to happen.

Living In The Freshest Chamber Of The Heart by Mark Nepo [Listen to Audio!] Our ability to find something to love, and to love again for the first time depends greatly on how we resolve and integrate where we've been before. A great model for us exists in the chambered nautilus, an exquisite shell creature that lives along the ocean floor. The nautilus is a deep-sea form of life that inches like a soft man in a hard shell finding his prayers along the bottom. Over time it builds a spiral shell, but always lives in the newest chamber. The other chambers, they say, contain a gas or liquid

that helps the nautilus control its buoyancy.

Even here, a mute lesson in how to use the past:

live in the most recent chamber and use the others to stay afloat. Can we, in this way, build strong chambers for our traumas:

not living there, but breaking our past down till it is fluid enough

to lose most of its weight?

Can we internalize where we've been enough

to know that we are no longer living there? When we can,

life will seem lighter. It is not by accident that the nautilus turns its slow digestion

of the bottom into a body that can float.

It tells us that only time can put the past in perspective,

and only when the past is behind us, and not before us,

can we open enough and empty enough to truly feel

what is about to happen. Only by living in the freshest chamber

of the heart

can we love again and again for the first time.

I haven't got a picture of a spiral nautilus shell creature but this pebble from Sidmouth is the closest I can find to  its tiger striped beauty.

Tonight 

just before the sun slipped away beyond Haldon Hills

 I received a phone call from the estate agent to say that the nice woman who came to view the house this morning, 

wants to bring her husband back to see it on Saturday.

Which lightens the most recent chamber of my heart.