Hear Rosemary’s remarks about the deeper meaning and purpose behind A Show of Hearts, from her launch party on February 13th in New York City.
Excerpt:
Years ago I started noticing more and more that our culture causes us to be really in our heads and stressed out, and that can cause this hardening and closing of our hearts. …I was really focused on activism, trying to change the world by being an activist, and that took on a number of different forms. But one of my biggest takeaways from those days was that broken people create a broken world. So, I’m basically on a mission to heal the hearts of as many people as possible, open the hearts of as many people as possible, and not just healing hearts that have been broken, but preventing hearts from breaking in the first place, starting young. So the other realization I had, I felt as an activist like we were spending so much of our time fighting against things, and it felt to me so much like Sisyphus pushing the boulder up the hill. Is this actually what’s gonna change things? And I came to a point where rather than pushing against, I wanted to focus more on solutions. So there was this quote that I came across years ago that became the thing I lived by as an activist. It’s by Buckminster Fuller,
“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”
So I realized, in order to have the power to change the world, we couldn’t do it from a place of trying to control or force or push, because that’s not where true power comes from. True power comes from presence. Being present to ourselves, to our thoughts, to our bodies, to our hearts, to our feelings, to each other, to the world, and present to the truth of what’s actually happening.
So, in order to find that presence, we need to shift from our heads to our hearts, go inside and sit with ourselves and find that place of stillness and get really centered, so that we can hear the subtlety of the heart and what it’s trying to tell us.
So you heard a little bit in the first episode about the darkest time in my life, and for a long time that experience, which lasted years, felt like hell. But I came to learn more and more, throughout that time of suffering, that it wasn’t just hell. There was meaning to it. But it started to feel more and more like a womb or a chrysalis, in which some kind of magic was brewing. And I didn’t know what it was, what it was going to look like. I discovered a new form of pushing. This new kind of pushing was about giving birth, to a new self, to various creative things, including this show.
So, I guess what I’m saying is that it all really comes down to courage. That’s what we all need. And I think for that we need presence and heart.
I wanted to read a quote from my grandfather’s book. The book is called Thoughts on Management.
“If we cannot believe one another, there is no point in communicating. That being the case, why is communication so often less than completely honest and forthright? The answer is chiefly lack of courage, the inability or unwillingness to face up to unpleasant realities because of fear that the truth will have negative consequences. Lack of courage pressures all too many individuals to withhold facts, alter facts, embellish facts or to simply lie.”
So, without courage, we can’t handle the truth. We can’t be present to it. So then how can we change things if we don’t have the courage?
I saw this picture the other day of petrified wood that had been filled in the cracks slowly over time with opal, and not just any opal, but fire opal, and apparently this is very rare. I saw that image and was like, “oooh! I feel like that! That’s what I feel like!” It felt like this brilliant metaphor for the magic that came in and filled in the cracks of me in the time in which I was suffering.