Pericardium - the membranous sac enclosing the heart
The heart is huge. Glowing. We enter it walking, running, listening to Spring peepers, or the quicksilver I’m here I’m here of a meadowlark, maybe the shriek of a blizzard. We are the man with the luxuriant mustache, the woman being lead by a joyful husky, the guy whose legs are crooked at impossible angles and who moves slowly, steadily, as though the grin on his face is a beacon.
We are held in the heart of Buffalo Park. As though we were life-blood, flowing through, taking in what we need for life. The trail winds into itself, like the ourobouros of the universe, the great snake that bites its own tail, because the antidote for its own venom lies there. I have brought my venom to the trail in easy weather and hard, stepped out into probable monsoons, watched lightning seam a cobalt sky, heard the voices of the Hozhoni picnickers echoing every thunderclap. “Boom,” they cried out, “Boom!” I’ve slogged through two feet of snow into a white-out, hoping to ice the pain of a bad love affair with a man whose name I have now forgotten---lost my way, and followed the snow-blurred trail back by heart, because its curve is familiar to me as the lines of my own body.
Always, when I emerge, my venom is neutralized. I am, if only by a fraction, more at peace.
Once this tender heart and the living pericardium of pine forest that surrounds it were intact. No more. Walk the far northwest curve of the trail and look toward the mountains. Human touch lies before you. The pericardium is compromised.
A doctor friend has told me: “Constrictive pericarditis causes the pericardium to stiffen and chokes the heart's movement…When I listen to the damaged heart, its sounds are distant, the beats less forceful.”
I continue to walk in Buffalo Park, but now detour before the northwest curve. It shortens my journey by perhaps a half mile. For that distance not taken, the old old heart sounds are muffled, the pulse of the place is weak as human ethics can sometimes be. It is the whisper of a broken heart, drowned out by heavy equipment roaring in the pericardium, building more.
with respect and sorrow,
Mary Sojourner