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

How I approach everything is how I approach my body.

On Saturday I made yogurt.  I use fantastic raw milk I get from a dairy farmer and freeze for storage in gallon jugs.  I love this milk and it’s been therapeutic for my body during this healing time.

The milk had not completely thawed, so as I heated it in my make-shift double boiler, I stabbed the big frozen chunk floating in a sea of milk with a kitchen knife.

I watched myself.  I watched myself, an insane murderer of milk, using more than enough force, as though the music from “Psycho” taken over me.  I watched myself as some frightened thing inside chased the soft animal of my body into the narrow place of coercion.

I watched myself be ungrounded and not allow the river of the moment to simply roll out before me in the present.

I saw I was far from my ancestors who offered milk both to the sky and to their knives.

I watched myself.  Tears welled up, but they did not come out.  I watched myself be more attached to entitlement than tenderness or sorrow.

I’m not an idealist.  I know it’s the nature of all life, as death’s twin, that with each step, each breath, each motion, something is destroyed, whether twig, fish or wind, each dying at its appointed time to feed the next thing.

But among all of the community of life, it’s only we humans, holy amnesiacs that we are — and this is why the Tzutzujil Maya call us that — who do our best to erase the memory of the grief debt all beings owe the holy ground for giving us life.  We want what we want now and without the physical and spiritual responsibility for where it comes from.  I am no different.

Our ancestors sang to the milk as they churned it into butter.  They sang to the milk as a holy being, to bless the beauty, nobility and grief of the milk’s sacrifice to die and change form from milk to cream to butter to human body.

Our ancestors sang to the metal as they smelted and forged it into knives.  They sang in recognition that minerals are living beings, old time deities like copper — Venus, tin — Jupiter, iron — Mars.  They sang to bless the beauty, nobility and grief of the metal’s sacrifice of offering up its essential nature to die and change form for our sake.

We mammals are born of milk, have bodies of milk, whether it’s mother’s milk, cow’s milk, goat’s milk or the milk of the ground.  The Milky Way is a splash of milk from the Big Dipper in the hand of the holy as an offering to the whole night sky.  Our ancestors tossed their milk offerings aloft from ladles as they made their kumis or kefir or yogurt or ghee or simply received life from the great udder herself.

The word “galaxy” comes from the Greek, galacto, galaxia, “milk.”

Later, I was making tea, and I saw the violence again.  I felt the spoon pierce the water in the pot as I stirred the tea and I flinched.  Oh, we say, it’s just a spoon and some tea.

But I didn’t ask permission to pierce.  How I approach everything is how I approach my body.  If I act  like matter is a slave, then that is how I treat my own body.

Then I thought, what if I simply say, “Thank you”?

What if I say thank you to the spoon, the tea, the milk, the knife.  Not just thank you for feeding me, although that, too.  But what if I am actually saying thank you as way to actually speak to the spoon, to the metal, to the milk.

What if I could be noble and courteous, courageous and humble enough to speak directly to the living matter I enslave.  What if I could actually bow before the great holy diaspora of matter dug out of the ground that serves me willingly every day, but that every day I fail to see.

What if I said “Please” and “Thank you” to my body, made of earth and milk, as I ride her through the world.

So I tried it.  I took the spoon out of the tea and before I stirred it again, I said, “Thank you.”  What happened?

My body immediately relaxed, exhaled and landed on the ground.

(Tenth in a series about healing pneumonia and asthma.)