Embodied Living

“Imagine when a human dies the soul misses the body…”
-Andrea Gibson from For the Days I Stop Wanting a Body

 I remember watching my eldest child run when he was four years old. There was no hesitation, no holding back. Every part of him leaned into the speed he wished to conjure, his feet flying out behind him. Mind and body working as one unwavering blur. What he wanted and what he was doing perfectly aligned.

When I was eight, I went on a field trip to a salt marsh. We were told to wear clothing and shoes we didn’t want to keep. After a hike, the adults told us to jump in and to get as covered in that oozing, abundant, silky mud as we could.

Looking at us a few moments later, we were a dream from the early days of Eden. Living mud, feeling only the rapture of living.  

The other day, I was listening to a podcast featuring four women of varying gender expressions and sexualities in conversation. They were describing something that happened to each of them around age ten.

It was around then that they stopped fitting seamlessly inside their bodies. Who they were on the inside and on the outside became-- “bisected”-- as they put it.

It was around this age that they realized that the world was looking at their bodies, paying attention to what their bodies could or couldn’t be. Weighing them, measuring them as a means of assessing the worth of the person inside.

One woman said, it was around age ten when something told her: “Now you have two things: you have your self and you have your body and you have to choose which one to protect, which one to preserve.”[1]

It does seem to happen to all of us to one degree or another. We separate our selves from our bodies.

We’re differently abled and others start to teach us that this is all we are.

Or we’re shown how to play a gender role with strict and punishing limits.

Or we start to notice that within this new set of rules our skin color is wrong, our shape is wrong, where we have hair and don’t have hair is wrong.

Or we simply start to discover our body’s sensations and desires and wonder if we’ve become horribly, shamefully, irredeemably depraved.

The body becomes a clumsy, disappointing, dangerous thing. An annoying liability we have to lug around for the rest of our lives.

This separation makes it easy to imagine that the soul is something to keep distinct and safe from the body. A sacred animating force that should not be sullied by the body’s experiences. A deeper spiritual consciousness to shield from the worldly.

But what I know is that when I sat next to my grandpa in his final days, we watched Jeopardy and ate chocolate pudding with plastic spoons. There was a hum of florescent lights and muffled conversations between loved ones in other rooms. I held his diary from the year I was born open on my lap and read aloud to him as he dozed off.

On March 12 he wrote, “Eve is as pretty as I expected. She is small, being a week old today, but lively. She sleeps a lot. She fusses when she gets hungry but otherwise well behaved, of course.” I reached out to take his hand in mine. When I did, his brow softened, and his breath deepened.

It would not have been possible without a body.

On days that are particularly sweet, we heal the distance that opened up when we were bisected. What’s tangible and intangible in us works together. Our outside and our inside mingle and bless one another.

On those days, the body becomes a miraculous spacesuit, allowing the part of us that loves and wonders to breathe as we bounce around our lives feeling and thinking and trying to figure it all out.

It does ache and creak and at long last give out. But anything that makes this life worth living is only possible because of the miraculous equipment we arrived in.

[1] Amanda Doyle from ep 257 of We Can Do Hard Things