Prelude

                There is something unique about the heart. Of all the organs in the body, of all the intricate fibres of muscle and tissue, of it all - the heart is a peculiar part of the flesh. It is a muscle that never stops moving. Before you left your mother’s womb, your heart was beating. Your heart sustained you even before your brain could learn to think or your tongue could learn to speak. Your heart is where you began.

                The heart has never stopped to rest in its toil to keep you alive. For all these years your heart has continued to sustain you, to beat. Your heart has been with you before you were born. Your heart is the first - and longest - rhythm that you were familiar with. In the womb, it was the pulse of your mother that your little heart tried to mimic as she shared blood with you; out of the womb, she cradled you close to her chest and there, with your ear against it, you heard her heart beat outside of her body.

                Sometimes, if all is quiet and you listen closely, you can hear your heart beating inside you. You can feel it gently push against your insides, with its soft thump-thump muffled by your flesh. You can place your hand over it and feel, feel how it reminds you that you are alive.

                Life. Alive. Your precious, precious heart makes sure you stay this way. It is important for this reason. You must take care of it. Guard it. Sacrifice for it.

                People do not always do this. In fact, people forget about their hearts. Take them for granted. They abuse their hearts in the worst of ways.

                They force the heart to beat to a different rhythm.

                The heart has its own natural rhythm. It is this natural rhythm that keeps people good. Happy. Sometimes people lose sight of what happiness is. Their poor, poor eyes, deceived so easily. They force their hearts to invest in something else, to beat to a rhythm other than its own. The heart has no choice but to obey. And so the sadness comes. The frustration. The vileness. The hatred. The anger.

                The heart does not like to beat to this different rhythm, but it does so despite the fact. And when their eyes and ears begin feeding bad blood to the heart, it has no choice but to pump to the rhythm of evil and hatred and vileness and anger and sadness. It has no choice but to distribute this throughout the body: to the muscles, to the nerves, to the brain. Too quickly the foreign blood has affected their actions, their emotions, their thoughts. It has no choice but to unwillingly, slowly kill with the silent hope that it will be cleansed.

                We shall follow the journeys of six men and women that changed the rhythm of their hearts. They each gave their hearts something other than blood to pump throughout their bodies.

                And we shall see what became of them.