Maybe your heart already knows what you need today. 🤍

Pause. Listen. Trust what rises to the surface.

I'm sitting on my sister's old comfy couch in Oakland drinking coffee, as bird sounds float through the open door on a chilly breeze. Music is playing on the borrowed laptop I'm using, and I'm here feeling all the feelings.  I'm grappling with that sensation you get when you are walking at a brisk pace on a moving sidewalk and it stops suddenly, pitching you forward, almost out of your skin. 

My body is here in the bay area and a small part of my heart has also returned, but most of it hasn't come back.  A part of myself is still there in Vietnam. I'm not sure how to call it back to the rest of me, or whether I should leave it there and return for it one day.  Can you live with part of your heart missing?  Will I sense its drum beat from the rice fields?  Will its thrumming get louder?  Or will it quiet and I will forget for a while that I'm not whole?  

The other day I read an article which recommended divorcing yourself from feelings in order to make "rational" decisions.  Part of me agrees that we should pause and ponder before we react, especially in times of crisis.  A bigger part of me rejects it as yet another message that people with passion and emotions do not make valid or rational decisions.  For much of my life, I have tried to conform to the current (hopefully temporary) overarching structure that demands we all "man up" or "lean in" and use our heads at the expense of our souls.  But surely there is room for those of us who move through the world guided by our intuition.  

Perhaps it is my optimistic nature which allows me to view the events in my past as happening exactly how they had to to bring me to exactly where I am meant to be, but my heart and intuition don't seem to have led me astray.  In fact, when things take a turn for the awful, it is often because I'm trying to override that gut sense and trying to play by someone else's rules that work perfectly for them, but are disastrous for me.  Life goes more beautifully (not necessarily easily, but things worth having don't seem to come easily) when my heart tells me where to go and then I build a rational, logical framework around those dreams.   That scaffolding allows me to turn those dreams into reality.  It seems like so many successful and happy people do this.  

So why is that method so often dismissed?  Is it more often dismissed when it comes from women who are too "emotional"?   Would we have great works of art that bring people to their knees, move them to tears, make them question everything they know, inspire them to more if we didn't allow some freedom in expression?  Or is it the repression that makes us burst out with a new vision of beauty and a new way forward?  Are the messages I receive from my culture that I'm not acceptable the exact things that inspire me to dream wider? 

This is building day four for our creation! In this video, Lea begins to wrap chicken wire over the dress skirt on the art sculpture figure. See how she puts it together! Our heart message of this day is to stay strong! Stay strong our Filipino brethren hit by the typhoons! 

Hearts For Haiyan is a community awareness art project by Filipino Artist Lea May Rivera. We use written paper hearts of loving messages from the public, turning it into 3d art forms. The art piece created serves as encouragement to all who were devastated with loss & currently face rehabilitation problems by the Typhoon. The art piece is geared for exhibition of the one year memorial event, "Typhoon Haiyan, One Year Later: Remembrance and Reconstruction," to be held on October 2014, at the Assembly Hall, International House, University of Chicago. Spearheaded by the Filipino American National Historical Society, Midwest Chapter and cosponsored by the University of Chicago, this 3-hour afternoon event will consist of 2 parts: a multi-media display (photographs, video clips, artwork) and a live program (readings, an interfaith prayer, one choral number, and a moderated conversation between selected speakers and the audience. Admission is free.

Learn more about our cause visit our official blog @

Official Blog: http://healingheartsforhumanity.wordpress.com/

To send a loving heart or prayer message to Typhoon survivors visit @

Official Submission Form: http://healingheartsforhumanity.weebly.com/

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Video by Lea May Rivera | www.learivera.com