It starts in the Heart

Ronnie attending funeral with friends!

We love our MUM, never mind
the rest of the people we didn't like!

It is the heart where it all starts; where all the feelings which bring about action and movement begin.  Everyone has a store of good heartedness and even a  criminal will probably love  their baby or their mother.  Think of the really bad  Kray twins, Reggie and Ronnie who, having killed, robbed and threatened more people than even they admitted to, adored their mother and used their hidden stash of cash to give her a  magnificent East End funeral  Their hearts were pretty over all black but even they had a little area in there reserved for their mother Violet.  That first love between child and mother, mother and child is a natural start point.  The mother loves the child unconditionally and as the child grows it can extend its area of love as far as it is able.  Some children may extend their natural love through loving friends and teachers, their pets, their dogs, cats and ponies and then they may start to see that there are people in the world in trouble and they may feel moved by this.   Love may, if it is looked after, extend from a particular friend or pet to lots of friends, and all animals.  The only trouble for the heart is when the love gets stopped, when the love for one thing means excluding others.  You can end up loving just the people like you, your own countrymen, your own family and your own friends and instead of love taking you out beyond the limit of the feeling, it closes right down and the heart can get hard patches which allow the one inside the heart to see things in a very partial light and to allow themselves to hate another person.  

love for a dear old dog

Love in old age

This is where you have to work on your heart  to make it cleaner. Just by seeing where and why it closes down and what in your being triggers off the negative reactions you get a chance to clean it up and make it as it was when you started off.  Sometimes it takes something painful to kick start feeling for others.  If you are ill or in pain, you begin to feel for others in pain.  If you lose someone you love, you start to realise what loss is for another person, if something goes wrong, you receive a blow to your own heart, you begin to know what another person might feel.  Thus, it is worth the pain if the end result means your love goes further than the Krays did.  It starts in the heart and ends there too