Cross-Training Body Mind Emotions Spirit | Rachael R. Resch

What if we heard the voices of each thing singing, “I am alive”?

As I begin to engage in the world a little more each day, I feel the vexing return of the hurried, fight or flight culture in my body.  I notice this because I notice I’m holding my breath.

I’m holding my breath, not in the sense of not breathing, but in the sense that I’m confining my breath’s natural expression in the moment.  I notice this is happening automatically as I turn my attention to “getting things done.”

As I reach to turn off the water, I use a little too much force, and I notice in that action I feel a meanness and desire to dominate the faucet so I can get what I want right now.

As I reach for my towel, I feel the inner fascist rushing forward, eager to conscript.

What if, as I dry off from my shower, I heard the voice of the being of the cotton plant itself singing in the towel?

What if I could hear, inherent in its cottony nature, the cotton itself singing its cottony story, singing of living rooted in the ground, maybe in a toxic factory farm, maybe in an organic farm, but either way, in the ground with its companion cotton plants, lined up straight like soldiers, descendents of the wild, economically uncooperative nomadic cottons of Mohenjo Daro, Guila Nacquitz and Agnes Scythicus, on the front line to clothe humans in their crazed, grief-stricken flight, singing with the rest of its plant-self, its leaves and twigs and flowers — white or pink or yellow with red sunbursts, singing about the cycles of hot, humid, southern sun and rain, of dark nights of respiratory glycolysis and bright days of photosynthesis, singing of the winds and the buzzing, crawling and flying insects, like big-eyed bugs, pirate bugs, green ladies, ground beetles, red fire ants, boll weevils, aphids and spiders, and of birds.

What if I could hear the cotton singing about being plucked off the stem, perhaps by a human hand, but more likely by sharp metal tongs of a mechanical cotton picker, itself conscripted out of the ground from its minerally life and banged into servitude, being shunted through the picker head, mechanical spindles and doffer then vacuum sucked out the picker door, singing about being separated from its own seeds in the cotton gin, being classed, carded, combed, about being dyed in who knows what, about being spun, woven or knitted, cut and sewed at unnatural break neck speeds in incessantly loud, clacking, unventilated factories, folded tight, packaged, shipped in airless boxes inside trucks roaring along highways to stores and eventually bought and hung in my bathroom, used and washed and generally ignored unless I find it useful to dry myself.

What if I could hear this whole story of beauty and heartbreak?

Maybe, just maybe, I might go a little slower.

Certainly I would be overwhelmed by the staggering grief and beauty of the intricate, cacaphophonous orchestra of all the world’s beings.  We are in relationship with everything.

The indigenous mind can hear these songs, and weeps, loves and feeds them.

The reason indigenous cultures are small is precisely to avoid the devastation that the sound of the unheard songs of matter induces in those of us who live in the civilized world and have little means to metabolize without fleeing into soul-numbing addiction and depression just to cope.

How I treat everything is how I treat my body.

If we act and think like matter is dead, imagine how we are treating our own bodies.  Imagine.

“You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.”

— Mary Oliver

But what if I heard the voices of my body.

What if I could hear the voices of my body singing, “I am alive!”  What if I could hear the voices of my body singing,”Yes,” or “No,” or “Maybe,” or “Lie-lie-lie-lie-lie-lie-lie-lie-lie.”

What if I could hear my heart singing her rhythmically swooshing love song as she ushers her blood children through my arteries and capillaries to my tissues.

Maybe, I might go a little slower.  Maybe I might love a little more.

What if I could hear the silvery, electrochemical siren songs of my nervous system as she swims, shimmering like a giant, winged, angel mother seahorse in the ocean of my cerebrospinal fluid, guiding with her songs every single one of the 75 trillion cells of my body.

Maybe I might go a little slower, and approach with some gradualness my relationship with my body and with all things, all of us strangers in a strange land.  I might long, just a little, to let the great elephant ears inside my chest twitch and unfold to hear the songs of all life.  I might weep.  I might love a little more.

This morning, as I was doing the “Body, I love you” practice, it came to me, seeping up to consciousness from within my lungs themselves, that most of my life, I have been afraid of my lungs.

Somehow I have not wanted to fully have lungs.  I’ve preferred to hold my lungs as separate, fleeing from them even as they are right there, nested in my chest.

The pleura are the weepers.  Pleura, from French pleurer and Latin plorare, “to cry, lament, implore.”  Pleura, from Greek “side, rib.”

“You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.”

— Mary Oliver

Let me not be an unwitting, grief-stricken soldier driving the body like a work-horse to be whipped by the terrified inner conquering mentality on the front lines against the natural, the natural body, the natural soul, who, like a rabbit or a river or a cedar just wants to breathe and move in the the great pulsing constant motion of the community of life and die at its appointed hour to feed more life, but let me be a sparkling soarer, a fearless galloper, a splashing swimmer, a whiskery nestler, a milk-drinking laugher, pleura of hope, a snorting flyer, a squawker, a sniffing pacer or a glistening jumper  in remembrance of the holy in matter.

How do I engage in the wider world and remember?

Through movement.  Through sensory awareness.

By asking “What does the body itself love?”  This is everything.

This is the life of matter.

(Number eight in a series about healing pneumonia and asthma.)