The heart of it all – science suspects the adrenal gland lets you know when you fall in love, but poets know better.

Hearts have astonishing lives. Hearts are faint and hearts are stout. Hearts are open and closed. Hearts are clean and hearts are mean, also warm and cold. Hearts are light and hearts are heavy, some as heavy as stones.

They beat as one – two hearts in waltz time. Other hearts are lonely hunters. Hearts are whole, half and broken. Politics make hearts bleed. Pierced by Cupid, some are saddened. Some, like singing birds are gladdened. Some are worn upon your sleeves.

Hearts are all over the place. His heart is in his mouth. Soon his heart is not in it anymore, because it has gone out of it. Sometimes your heart is in the Highlands, in the end it gets buried in the Wounded Knee. Wherever your heart goes, it belongs to Daddy.

How did it all happen? How did the heart acquire a personality? It is a pump, an automatic pumping machine that can be replaced by a gadget made of plastic.

Our forebears must have noticed that of all the bodily organs, the heart is the one that seems to have a life of its own. It bangs away all the time, when you’re asleep and when you’re awake. You can hear it and feel it. When you gets excited, it does too.

Added to that, the heart is in the middle of the body. It is the very heart of the matter – a point that was noted early. Kill the heart and the body dies.

So if something important happens, if he sees her or she sees him – something goes boing! Surely it’s the living heart that is reacting. It must be so because you can feel it pounding.

Except that today we knew better, we are in the twentieth first century and deep in the age of science. We know the heart is a pump.

So what is it that sends the signal of love through our bodies? A doctor might explain, “The brain analyses what the eye sees and what the ear hears, and adds it to something at your surroundings. However, if you want to know what makes the sound boing! It is probably the adrenal gland.”

That is what I am afraid to hear : the adrenal gland. A grotty little piece of gristle adhering to the kidney. Can you picture it on Valentine? Would poets write about it? Would the absence of Romeo cause Juliet’s adrenal gland to break?

We truly need a bodily symbol for love. Scientists may laugh, but the ancients have good reasons to pick the heart. We subconsciously remember from the womb, the beat of our mother’s heart.

So was the heart at first the metaphor for maternal love? Moreover, wasn’t it evitable that it is romantic love? We all seem to think it is.

How many times it has to beat? At least 70 times every minute for an average lifetime of 75 years. It turns out to be 100,000 times a day, or nearly 3 billion times in my life. I owed my life to the to this little struggling thing in my chest. Thing? No, I couldn’t call it a thing. It was alive and working very hard.

I watched my heart closely and with growing respect. This may sound silly, but it’s alive and sentient to me. A hardworking and unappreciated friend, well worthy to represent a sentinent like love.

My heart goes out to my heart. And I hope it could keep up the good work for a while longer.

Somehow I was in tune with a very old instinct. I knew the meaning of the old saying – be of good heart.