Recuperation/Recovery #6: Heart and Hearth

What have heart and hearth got to do with each other except that they share the same first five letters?  I have often thought that there should be a connection, though etymologically there is none that is apparent to me, each one coming quite directly from a different early Germanic root word.  For me the connection is approximately this: each one is central to some sense of house or home, and here I mean literally as well as metaphorically central. 

The heart is housed in the body centrally and pumps its blood to our extremities, including that bonebox of a skull protecting our brains, without which my forefinger would not be able to hunt and peck its way through the writing of this post, and without which there would of course be no post to posit, no etymological proposition to explore. 

A few years ago I watched an ultrasound image of my own heart beating and was struck by the profundity of it all, since I was observing the central pump of my own life system, realizing that it had been faithfully doing its work since months before I was born and would keep going until the end of my life.  It was, both literally and metaphorically, getting to the heart of the matter.

In our house we don’t have a hearth, which is actually the floor of a fireplace, but our woodstove provides a good approximation of one, as it is central to our sense of home and an important source of warmth, again both literally and metaphorically.  Both the hearth and the heart are central to my idea of recuperation, which is the restoration of health and balance to my body system.

When I was recovering/recuperating in Foothills Medical Centre in the early stages of this illness journey, we had some notes on the whiteboard in my hospital room.  One was the following poem by Li Po that our son JE put there:

Long is the journey,

Long is the journey,

So many turnings

And now where am I?

And where was I?  I was in a hospital bed where people who cared were looking after me, working in every way they could to facilitate my body’s recuperation.  It was not, however, where I wanted to be, though I understood the necessities that kept me there; I wanted to be home.  After all, home is where the heart/hearth is.  So the other messages on the whiteboard, besides the list of questions to ask the doctors on their early morning rounds, were reminders of home: my own bed, a place where I could see Halifax Harbour, a place to sleep with the window open.

Now I am here, in our house, in a comfortable bed, and the rainbow of recovery is still working.  Alleluia, I say, let the recuperation continue!