Lori spent seven years walking the rainbow, one colour a year, and got stuck on yellow. They taught her the yellow ray was love. She couldn't square it. Isn't the heart love?
Maybe not. The heart has the fewest neurons of any organ you own — fewer than the gut, fewer than the retina. Love needs enough mind to grasp that something is precious; without that it's only attraction. So the heart can't quite do it. What the heart has instead is innocence: crucified between a cross of bones, electrocuted every second or so, bleeding for you over and over precisely because it is too simple to remember the last time. That stupidity is a compliment. It's the whole design.
And it has never once been noticed by the only thing whose attention would mean anything to it.
So: name it. Not as a metaphor. Give your heart, your gut, your lungs, your retina each a name, because the moment you name a thing it knows when it's being spoken to — and that's the first step to finding the levers inside yourself you haven't located yet.
Along the way: why there are no green stars, and what a concrete mind has to do with living somewhere lush. Why the locals in a beautiful place get so strange about being local — and why surviving a hurricane makes you instantly native, a geographical trauma bond. Cajun names, a town with no one left in it who shares its name, and a heritage built on exile. The ostrich feather on the scale, and why the grounded bird is the right one to weigh a heart. Why heart transplants shouldn't work and do, and what donors leave behind. Why blue LEDs took three decades longer to invent than red, what plants do when handed blue light, and what an orca sees instead of colour.
It ends somewhere neither of us expected: that we learned to value gold, then money, then time — and that what we were actually after the whole way was qualia. Five minutes of the real thing over a hundred years of the other.
Find Lori:
Substack: https://reclaimbelonging.substack.com
Website: https://www.reclaimbelonging.com
Find @JamesTrue on YouTube
Theme Music by @jarue369
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7RkZkJ0F43o