"fine, i'll take it all"
Notes on Wounding and Wonder
Thank you for reading (en)WOMBED, a love letter which surprises me each week with its direction and assertions. This is the unending mystery of writing — discovering what one truly thinks in the unfurling of language which pulls on the threads of being. I wish you thresholds that bring you to your knees in wonder. I wish you to be free. I wish the well of your heart to lavishly water your entire life.
Dear beautiful human,
The fact that these are letters allows me to imagine you – to feel the ways in which your humanity reaches mine, and mine reaches yours.
Hi!! Please introduce yourself in the notes – please say hello even if we know each other. Bring your particularity to flesh out my imagination.
I want to tell you more of my story – the ways in which i grew up that made me and fragmented me. The ways in which i am healing and in process, the way in which my ever-devoted heart moves daily from an embodied imprint of original sin to original sacredness.
And to somehow accompany you there too – for my words to be a healing balm of an energy transmitting from that which is real and vital and alive in the universe, all around us, moving through me, landing in your being, and you moving it forward with your particularity, reaching me in that circular reality we call Life.
You are sacred, you know? I’m curious what that invokes. How you might see your body today when you shower, behold yourself naked or perhaps you don’t behold, because the body exposed is too painful to bear. When was the last time you let the day move you from a place of love. Appreciation. Holy wonder.
I recently learned that the word wound is etymologically connected to the word wonder. Old English “wundor” which means marvelous thing, miracle, object of astonishment” and the German term “wunde,” wound. They are, at the very least sonically connected, though spelling similarities are there as well. It makes sense because wonder breeches and supplants us. And it can be uncomfortable, this ravishing that essentially deals us a wound. And in the wound, it has a guaranteed landing place.
Of course, here is where i gently posit that one cannot be astonished without knowing pain, though i would also say that wonder came first and wounding later, and you only have to watch a child to know this is true. Eventually, they stop being that different.
I wrote last week of an asthma attack that nearly took me out. In the past, after one subsided and i could breathe again, i lived in fear for days, weeks afterward. The fear is, of course, intelligent. These kinds of attacks really can kill, but the anger, shame, panic, and all the painful responses my body had to this while remaining unfelt and disintegrated can easily become a lens from which i see everything. The world, my beloveds, myself-- unsafe. And, unsafety diminishes our life force. Severs us from it.
I believe this is how the ego develops -- this brilliant beautiful neurotic adaptation we often feel is us emerges to create safety. To make the world make sense, and us in it powerful again after being forced to drink the vulnerable cup of our humanness. And this shape-shifting protector (with its legion of protectors) flattens reality into thoughts, removes the oh-so-wild landscape of sensation and emotion, rendering us two dimensional like a scratched-out sketch in black pencil.
To be free, we must learn to love these ego parts. To see them for what they are – messy and well-intentioned attempts at reclaiming safety, creating belonging, and restoring agency. Even now as you perhaps recognize one of these parts operating, you might wrap your arms around it, bless its feverish efforts to save you from the wounding, settle it with your caring gaze.
Then, fiercely look the wound in the face, touch it with your open palm, receive its unbidden dark gifts. I promise you, what kills, is avoiding it, circling it from a distance, obscuring it, denying it, separating yourself from it, telling stories about it. Anything, but being with it.
It took me a few days to touch this place. I also needed someone to be with me in that moment (in this case, my primordially wise and loving therapeutic coach, S.), to encircle the space with her arms, so that i might fall into the wound, through the layer of control and numbness, through the mirror of fear, all the way into the powerless place, where my body felt like a machine, and no tool i had helped me in those moments of lost air and altered consciousness.
To draw near the powerless place and embrace it is the first act of healing. To contend with the truth that we are small and vulnerable in a vast and wild world is so damn scary. Later, i shared all this with friends, the lightbulb moments too of noticing the ways i insulate myself from this reality – how i create perceived agency through the comforts of a schedule, through eating exactly the kind of foods i’ve deemed healthy, how the elements usually can’t reach me, because i am rarely vulnerable enough to be truly affected by real-life conditions. Many of us live this way, and i am not saying it’s wrong, but most days civilization is a kind of grand insulator from Life. And, does it serve us?
So, i cried the ugliest loveliest tears in the presence of S. whose motherliness held me across the expanse. I cried for being breakable, and still surprised by calamity.
I cried for my body that despite all my attempts to keep her healthy and regulated, she still suffers and bears this weakness limitation. I cried that i might die and leave my two girls behind, and that this life continues to break me and i often don’t want to be here, with a wide and stupidly open heart that yearns and hopes and connects.
I cried at my dumb decision to have children who have now made it imperative for me to be around and act like a half-sane person.
I cried for the bruises on my arms from where a nurse poked me with a needle again and again in her attempt to find a vein.
I cried because i felt the feral clinging to life that my body is wired with. That she will pant and gasp and claw her way back again and again, even when something else in me wants to give up and float away.
Part of me is embarrassed to own these, let alone scribble them here for you. And most of me continues to feel the radiance of life returned. Feel the unabashed wonder that we are here, drinking in this air, touching each other. And the trees are greening. And birdsong is repetitively sweet, and something in me says, like the poet Ada Límon, “Fine, then i’ll take it. I’ll take it all!”
This post was everything, Simona. You summarized in a few hundred words what I've been feeling for the last three years since my divorce—wound and wonder, my constant seesaw ride.