A Heart That’s Not Perfect
By Elizabeth Ann Quirino
I see hearts everywhere and therefore I baked this Heart-shaped Bibingka, the Filipino Rice Cake for Valentine’s. I see heart-shaped cakes, with chocolate frosting cascading down luring us to take a slice. I love hearts. I love the shape of it on anything be it food, paper, fabric, jewelry, art — whether perfect or imperfectly formed.
In kindergarten, one of my first favorite activities was to draw a heart for Valentine’s Day. My teacher taught me to fold a piece of paper and with a pencil I traced half of the heart shape from the cardboard template teacher provided. Then I cut out the folded heart, unfolded it and voila — I had a perfect heart. I pasted that paper heart on a red cardboard and wrote out ‘I love you Daddy and Mommy’ which I copied from the blackboard. My parents were delighted with my creation. I was elated at how much joy I gave them. From then on, I always equated a heart with love and happiness.
A heart shape looks like an inverted triangle with the sides rounded and a pointed bottom that if measured is approximately a 45-degree angle. This shape is patterned after our body part, the heart. It is that part of us that makes us live. For as long as our heart beats, pulsates, throbs and palpitates we are alive.
The shape of our real heart has the semblance of imperfection and does not look anything like the perfect ones we see on art, food or ads around us. And that seems to be what life is about. We try to find perfection in our everyday imperfect lives. Somehow, we just must make sense of how we can make that work in our life, in our heart.