In the third circle of the Aztec calendar, we see how we begin our growth by emerging from the world of water. There, we only listen to the beating of two drums. One of them, beats from far away, but resonates in all of our being. It’s sound has been there before our time. It is the unit by which we measure our time. It is the heart of our mother.

For each one of us, there is no sound like it. And it’s beat is unique. There is no other like it. Our growth is orchestrated by its rhythm.

And there is a second drum, this one beating much faster than the first one: our own heart.

Both of them, the fast one and the slow one make harmony.

As we emerge from water into the world of air we preserve our ability to recognize not only the heart beat of our mother, but the heart beat of our loved ones as well, a phenomena known in Spanish as “Corazonada”, which literally means “a message from the heart.”

I remember the numerous occasions in which my Grandma would take her hands to her heart and exclaim “una corazonada!”

A while later we will be informed of an accident or sudden illness of a relative. At times, Grandma will even say the name of the afflicted person. Time and again, her corazonadas were accurate. After a while, I got to trust her heart.

“How come you can feel these things?” I once asked my Grandma.

She looked at me and said “How come you don’t feel them?”

I said that obviously my heart had nothing to tell me.

Grandma laughed and shook he head. Then she said, “your heart talks to you too, but its voice is quieter than the one of your head. It talks to you with feelings, with images, like the ones you see in your dreams. When you love someone, their heart also speaks to you, it does not matter how far away they may be. You are likely to listen to a corazonada when you are not thinking too much, when you are calmed. Older people slow down, and find it easier to feel corazonadas, but in reality, everyone regardless of their age can feel them.”

Grandma then said that our heart gave shape and flavor to the world around us. If we liked someone, we had our mind make a good story about their actions. If we disliked them, the story would be a negative one.

“It is not that we have make up our mind” she said “it is that we have make up our heart.”

She said that hatred and envy were the most poisonous elements of the heart, a source of bad medicine for the world, elements that we shall avoid at all cost, and if we found ourselves afflicted with them, we shall do everything within our power to remove them from our heart for they would certainly destroy us.

Grandma said that those who bring harm to others by projecting these emotions to them, can only do so because they have already harmed themselves. They just give what they have in their heart. At the end, she said, we can only give what we have in our heart, nothing more, nothing else.

Grandma said that we not only receive disturbing messages with the heart. We also received pleasant ones too. Those were likely to happen when we found ourselves happy with no apparent reason. “That is –she said- joy from far away.”

Years later, at the base of Mount Shasta, I found myself missing my two older kids, who were far away. A medicine man looked at me and asked me what was going in my heart. I told him. He nodded, and took out some sage from his bag.

“Let’s sing” he said as he burned some sage “and we will have the song carry your love to your children.”

And I sang, and poured my heart out to the song.

When I got home, my oldest kids were calling me on the phone to tell me how much they loved me.