The Third Act: Heart Songs

Let’s hear it for conversation hearts, Valentine’s Day cards, bouquets or heart-shaped chocolates from unknown admirers! Sure, sure, but feeling and expressing heartfelt emotions is not a once-a-year thing. We don’t have to be “Damn Yankees” to know we gotta have heart every day, miles and miles of it, in order to get through life. Instead, we have to grow our heart’s capacity — more big, more of.

And doing so doesn’t mean we get all moony and mushy, don’t get things done, don’t stand up for what’s important. No matter our age, there’s plenty we can do. “However bad it gets, anybody willing to act with goodwill, in good faith, with some competence in acting, can make things a little better. I don’t care if it’s the last day of the world. That’s my faith,” says 91-year-old author, poet and environmental activist Wendell Berry in a 2020 Orion magazine interview. In combination, he’s the author of over 50 titles of poetry, fiction and essay collections, all of which underscore one message: Humans must live in harmony with the natural rhythms of the earth or perish. He extols small-scale farming as essential to healthy local economies, and healthy local economies as essential to the survival of the planet.

Because we’re not all in a position to have a farm, small or otherwise, I choose to see Berry’s invitation as a figurative one. The goodwill, good faith and competence Berry refers to, as well as an understanding of the accumulative effect of small acts for good, were evident at the recent dedication of NeighborImpact’s new 10,000-square-foot food bank in Redmond. Since 1985, the nonprofit has provided food, pre-school education, energy assistance and emergency housing for those living in poverty in Central Oregon. The organization served 900,000 meals in 2024, such is the need. With the potential of federal funding being curtailed or eliminated, we’ll have to open our hearts, schedules and pocketbooks to support these programs that keep our regional community clad, fed, educated and sheltered.

In view of other policy changes coming down the pike, there will be any number of cultural, educational and social “gardens” or “small-scale farms” that will need communities to band together to help cultivate and sustain. No special equipment or training is necessary other than to have a heart, to be of good heart. And no one puts matters of the heart into words better than Oregon author Brian Doyle. This excerpt from his essay “How We Wrestle Is Who We Are” is proof.

“My son Liam was born 10 years ago. He looked like a cucumber on steroids. He was fat and bald and round as a cucumber on steroids. He looked healthy as a horse. He wasn’t. He was missing a chamber in his heart. You need four rooms in your heart for smooth conduct through this vale of fears and tears, and he only had three, so pretty soon doctors cut him open and iced down his heart and shut it down for an hour while they made repairs, and then when he was about 18 months old he had another surgery, during which they did more tinkering, and all this slicing and dicing worked, and now he’s 10, and the other day as he and I were having a burping contest he suddenly said, ‘Explain to me my heart stuff,’ which I tried to do, in my usual Boring Dad way…

“Eventually my son will need a new heart, a transplant when he’s 30 or 40 or so, though Liam said airily the other day that he’s decided to grow a new one from the old one, which I wouldn’t bet against him doing eventually, him being a really remarkable kid. But that made me think: If we could grow new hearts out of old ones, what might we be then? What might we be if we rise and evolve, if we come further down from the brooding trees and out onto the smiling plain, if we unclench the fist and drop the dagger, if we emerge blinking from the fort and the stockade and the prison, if we smash away the steel from around our hearts, if we peel the scales from our eyes, if we do what we say we will do, if we act as if our words really matter, if our words become muscled mercy, if we grow a fifth chamber in our hearts and a seventh and a ninth, and become as if new creatures arisen from our shucked skins, the creatures we are so patently and brilliantly and utterly and wholly and holy capable of becoming…

“What then?”

—Poet and author Ellen Waterston is a woman of a certain age who resides in Bend. “The Third Act” is a series of columns on ageing and ageism.

This article appears in The Source Weekly February 20, 2025.