you are a tree

how i keep figuring out i am not a machine

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 rest as you navigate this complex world. I wish you to befriend your body and heart, and let them be your guides. I wish you safety and presence in the middles and in-betweens when all feels confusing or lost. You are not lost. You are a tree.

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Dearest human,

This month of April has felt blurry, full, and i have felt an exacerbated sense of dispersion. The magnetic center of life gone dark, silent, unblinking, and i adrift and rudderless. The ocean metaphors always land more romantically in my system, although this state is not remotely poetic. More like a sense of moving through the world needing to palpate its contours in order to find my way – the well-worn pathways turned foreign. And is that such a bad thing? Perhaps merely uncomfortable.

As one who has lived a long time driven to know the next thing and the next thing, and to feel oriented on the trajectory toward a goal (i roll my eyes a bit as i write this since nothing vital or exquisite really happens through obsessive planning and an a priori kind of certainty) i’ve had to learn much about the in-between, the unraveling of a path, the discovery that can only be made when dancing with mystery.

So, i’ve been pausing and breathing into the middle and the liminal.

This lost feeling might also linger because of a recent destabilizing event, though with each day, it has become more integrated, mostly through sitting outside with the sun on my face, or taking a meander through the woods, baby strapped to my body, both of us soaking in the nectar of azaleas, knockout roses, and tulip magnolias. The world is so alive, its pulsing waves of energy arising like benedictions, bathing us, reaching into the very marrow, tuning our DNA’s song to theirs.

We are nature. We belong to Her.

I continue to integrate also through sitting with those who love me. Letting tears continue to cleanse the wound, letting this body bring up all that needs mending and tending. The medicine issues from the wound, life’s stirring from the death we thought was the end, our arising from chasm and collapse. In other words, the work of the Feminine, not because it is domestic (or should only come from women -- this is everyone’s work), but precisely because it is wild, organic, and magical freaking literally down to earth. So, yes, it feels magical to our hyper civilized and sanitized ways.

Is it just me, or is it slow, painstaking work to become fully alive? Wholly human?

Appalachian Trail, North Carolina

Two things immediately occur to me:

1.)   Organic

2.)   Re-turn and Re-member.

In my former life as an English professor, i always loved a good definition dive (an etymological one too!). I still do.

  Organic

1. relating to or derived from living matter.

   Maybe this is a bit obvious, but it bears sitting with, because consider how often we treat ourselves as mechanical. We override our intuition and our body’s basic needs. We push past our energy levels into a land where exhaustion is the baseline. We perform when we can’t access inspiration or energy organically. We shame ourselves into giving more and more, ignore our nervous system rhythms to the point of forgetting what they even are, and we lose contact with sensation and emotion – the central expressive lines of the body.

   Beautiful human, you are living matter. And matter is sacred.

    ~ Just a little fun fact, matter derives from the Latin mater, which means mother, secret wisdom swimming in the layers of language  -- the Feminine Principle & its rootedness in incarnation, immanence, embodiment. ~

   And, as living matter, you and i are subject to nature and its principles. We have a blueprint of what makes us thrive and what harms us.

   I can name a dozen places where my pattern is to override my body. To intellectually justify the effort, to force a sympathetic activation in my system (the sympathetic nervous system under safety is where motivation, action, play, focus, and determination live) that whenever the task is done i collapse in a stupor.  In the past, i often felt proud and a little high after this kind of intensity. Even when i was diagnosed with burnout and adrenal fatigue, i felt that i had done it all in the name of what truly mattered – education, service, creativity, altruism etc. etc. In this ideological landscape, partially fueled by a certain form of capitalism and partially by religion, there’s no turn-on like martyrdom.

   

2. happening or developing naturally over time, without being forced or planned by anyone

   Something about this makes me melt. Go weak in the knees. It feels like death and resurrection. I know a lot about being forced, and later became extremely adept at perpetuating the pattern. In the name of growth, in service of my highest good, i was taught early to mistrust my body’s cues, to disconnect from feeling when i had to perform for church leaders, Sunday School and regular schoolteachers, even my parents.

   My last two years of elementary, i left the cocoon of a humble neighborhood school for a prestigious one for gifted children. For the next three years, in an environment of increasingly high expectations of excellence in every area of academics, i learned to override my body’s natural freeze at the harshness of the teachers, more accurately professors, each one with a PhD and multiple books that we often used as classroom texts.

   Memorization of the material and perfect recitation delivered boldly while standing in front of the class was the name of the game. I trepidatingly committed massive amounts of information for each class to memory. Every course required it -- Biology, Physics, History, Grammar, German, Geography, you get the gist. I took more classes and did more difficult work at this school than in my entire high school career in the U.S. Even college expectations didn’t feel on par with the ten to twenty-page essays we wrote for our Romanian Language Arts classes in sixth and seventh grade.

   And in the vortex of being a pre-teen, terrified of the raw brilliance of others, of my own too, the threat of corporeal punishment and ridicule, the disappointment of my parents, i studied and studied, and when i couldn’t study anymore or my body felt like it was going to die from shame, fear, confusion, i fled to the library and began skipping classes regularly. It started with Geometry and a theorem is a statement that can be proved to be true based on known and proved facts. An Axiom is an established rule or principle or a self-evident truth, these memorized tropes showing up in my dreams.

   I had a recurring one where I am in the front of the classroom and can’t remember the underlying axiom for equals. The teacher is screaming you’re being stupid! What is it??? My deskmate is trying to whisper the answers to me and is hit with a ruler. A constellation of hives breaks all over my chest and i run out.

   These dreams are almost ad litteram replays of what most days were like there. Other classmates are starting to lose their voices regularly, some of the boys have urinated in class when asked to stand up and recite the lesson. Some are already smoking in the bathrooms to take the edge off.

   It’s terror and mayhem and we make up for it by playing with each other’s hair while lying under the trees in the schoolyard, watching squirrels scamper for acorns, the white honey sun on our faces. We cry and scream and curse the teachers, the school, and our parents for putting us there. The trees tend to us as we let the earth embrace out bodies under their shade and we dream of becoming them, like Daphne into a laurel when Apollo pursues her.

   We watch the trees change and something in us knows that our growth is no longer like theirs. We become too mature for our years, and simultaneously stay frozen in time, the pain of performance wrenching something from us we are not yet ready to give.

   

   This pattern of too much too soon has repeated itself several times in my life in different ways, later brought on by my own re-enactment. I learned i could overcome any perceived limitation if i pushed, if i prepared, if i didn’t let myself feel. I taught my first college course at twenty-two to students who were near my age or even older. I counseled, coached, and led groups of people with twice or three times my life experience. Leadership seemed to find me whether i was ready for it or not, and i made sure i was ready.

   It's been only in the eight years since my healing journey began that i learned to check in with my body, listen to the tightening of my belly, take the lump in my throat into consideration. There were voices within me that had been silenced for so long who began to clamor as i began to listen. It was painful and hard, and wondrous.

   Humbling too, to let myself be kindly overtaken by the reality of my creatureliness. The cult of performative heroism so pervasive that i had forgotten this essential truth: My body, my energy, my soul has limitations. Touching those, letting reality teach me where i begin and where i end became the path of wholeness.

   The mind will trick us into believing we are limitless, but since the body holds the mind and shapes the mind, to feel our limitations not as a liability but as a grace is to change our thinking. To deepen our stance and become indelible. To stay with the liminal, trusting that in the dark or twilight of being, something is happening. To make our life art, or prayer. Perhaps they are the same thing.

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   *the artwork is by Mary Evans and entitled Daphne Becomes a Tree