Being Here
Did I ever tell you about the time I shoplifted a frozen turkey from a Piggly Wiggly wearing nothing but a tube top and daisy dukes?
Here, have a wire brush to scrub out every vestige of that image from your minds. Yes, even the bare, hairy midriff.
Aren't non sequiturs fun? Technically, it's just a spurious image. Fractious Filiations of an in-between state of mind.
I've just been to physical therapy which—thank the goddess—involves a holistic approach...Korean Ki Gong, which offers that the mind-body problem is no problem at all.
The energy of the Earth comes up through the feet, feet planted on the ground, core muscles appropriately set and held, breathing up and in, up and out, in and out, out and down. Connectedness to the Earth, its energy coming up through the body and releasing through the hands and fingertips at the extensions of the arm movements.
White and light and black and dark. Matter and mist, dust and spark. The body is a conduit through nerves which plumb and pump and simply agree to let it all pass unimpeded, frictionless.
Today my physical therapist, J., performed what she called “energetic therapy”, which turned out to be a ministration of energy up through her feet and into her hands and fingertips into points of my suffering shoulder and into my compensating back and spine. Imagine the breath of a loved one next to you. You feel it on your skin, giving you clues as to distance and position of the breather. This is like that, only you feel it through the skin and deep inside, running along nerve channels. Comforting like that. Given freely, accepted freely. Given not from her, just through here from the Earth below and Heaven's energy from above.
There is a certain peace and a larger and restored proprioception. Where lie the arms and legs and core is of little matter when you're sensitive to the artificial nature of boundaries: you see how self is innervated by the Rest until there is no Here and There, just Here. No Rest-of-It, just All-of-It.
This kind of therapy illuminates the whitespace around the injured parts, giving you a sense of well-being with some healing required. It's more appealing—and in an organic way—than focusing on the blossom of pain and feeling like the other parts of you are along for the via dolorosa.
A living thing generates an ambit and casts it aside simultaneously. Mind animates the body and body propels the mind, each inhabits the other and together with others creates the reticulum we all inhabit.
We create Andere, Other, in order to observe from an objective distance. My injury is not me; the accident created an Other, an injured part, and physical therapy and bodily healing help dissipate the distance between Me and Other, and one day I'll put it all back together into a Here with no There, and I'll feel Whole again, Whole and Connected.
Somewhere in human history we created a There and populated it with a God in order to understand the world as a contained Entirety, but we forgot that we were also supposed to bring it back and put it all together.
Perhaps too many were seduced by the power of pointing a finger, an act which requires a There, subject and object. Perhaps a pattern held in place too long becomes a structure, rigid and unyielding. Perhaps its easier to Know than to Understand.
I know very little, other than knowledge, like truth, is subject to time and change, but I understand more and more as I continue through Here.
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